Sample Abstract for Voting System

Suffrage is the right of the people to choose their officials as their representatives, for definite and fixed periods, to whom they entrust the exercise of the powers of government. This right, as conferred by the constitutional provision, is not a natural right of the citizens, but a political right intended to enable them to participate in the process of government to assure it derives its powers from the consent of the governed and this right is well practiced in school. The election process is in need of a standard and secure electronic system that voters can rely on and have trust in. Currently, schools implement its own process for voting; the lack of consistency between polls results in numerous problems. Various models have been developed to address the issues of security, privacy, validation, and quality control. However, these models do not meet all of the requirements needed for a good system. Exploring online voting from a systems perspective can demonstrate the commonalities of the current systems and the possible solutions for the voting process.

Due to numerous current issues, online voting is seen as a procedure that brings more problems than solutions to our society; however, it is likely to be an inexpensive and less time consuming method for all users involved if a reliable and secure system is utilized. Elections allow the populace to choose their representatives and express their preferences for how they will be governed. Naturally, the integrity of the election process is fundamental to the integrity of democracy itself. The election system must be sufficiently robust to withstand a variety of fraudulent behaviors and must be sufficiently transparent and comprehensible that voters and candidates can accept the results of an election. Unsurprisingly, history is littered with examples of elections being manipulated in order to influence their outcome.

The design of a good voting system, whether electronic or using traditional paper ballots or mechanical devices, must satisfy a number of sometimes competing criteria. The anonymity of a voter’s ballot must be preserved, both to guarantee the voter’s safety when voting against a malevolent candidate, and to guarantee that voters have no evidence that proves which candidates received their votes. The existence of such evidence would allow votes to be purchased by a candidate. The voting system must also be tamper-resistant to thwart a wide range of attacks, including ballot stuffing by voters and incorrect tallying by insiders.

The major aim of this Capstone Project is to determine the practical viability in the use of online voting in the the University of San Agustin. Due to the complex nature of online voting, this study will be mainly focused on the security aspect of online voting. The study aims at replicating the ease of use of the traditional paper-based voting. In school elections, citizens who are eligible to vote in an election, use a paper-based ballot when casting their vote. The Online Voting System (OVS) proposed in this study makes it easy for the voter to express his preference especially across different political parties. On the other hand, this system turns out to be quite complex and time consuming to collate statistics and even worse to finish the counting process and declare the official result of the election. The application, therefore, should improve the speed and accuracy in counting the votes without being a detriment to the overall security of the whole system. The study is aimed in finding an optimal solution to these requirements.