2017 IEEE Region 10 Humanitarian Technology Conference (R10-HTC)

21 - 23 Dec 2017, Dhaka, Bangladesh

Biometrically Secured Electronic Voting Machine

Rahil Rezwan, Huzaifa Ahmed, M. R. N. Biplob, S. M. Shuvo, Md. Abdur Rahman
Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering
American International University-Bangladesh
[email protected]

Abstract—Voting is one of the fundamental rights of every that it will not require too much time to publish who has won
citizen of a democratic country. By utilizing the right of the the election. It has very high accuracy rate in case of both
voting, people elect their most suitable leader who will lead them. identifying voter and counting votes. Another advantage of the
In this modern era where technology is being used in every aspect system is, it is completely offline system. For this reason, the
of life, election is a place to apply the best technology. In this
data cannot be hacked. The flowchart of the system is given
project, we have developed a system which will be suitable for
elections in countries like Bangladesh. The usual system for below.
voting in Bangladesh is ballot paper-based voting system, where
voting is sometimes unfair. In this proposed system we have used
Arduino and Finger Print Scanner that can identify each voter,
count votes and can prevent fake votes. The proposed system is
more digital, technology-based and secured system.

Index Terms—Voting, Electronic Voting Machine, Arduino,

Finger Print Scanner, Biometric, Fingerprint

I. INTRODUCTION
In a voting system the random citizens elect a candidate by
law who represents them and works for them for their welfare.
If a wrong candidate is selected, it brings a disaster to the
nation. In developing countries like Bangladesh, the random
way of election is ballot paper based system which is very
much time consuming and sometimes very much unsafe. By
this system there is always some risk to elect the wrong
candidate. Although Bangladesh is going to introduce EVM in
next parliamentary election but this system also lacks from
security [1]. Considering these problems, in this project, a new
system of voting is proposed based on electronic voting
machine (EVM). The additional feature of this system is
biometric security which will be realized by the fingerprints of
the voters. In voting systems, the system should be easy to
authenticate and verify, it also should have high accuracy rate
and reliability. The system also has to be cost effective and
unique [2]. In [3], an advanced voting system is introduced
where adhar card was used but the system is complicated and
the system is online. There are always some risks in online
system. In this literature, the proposed system will identify
each voter by their fingerprint with help of fingerprint scanner
(FPS). It is able to detect if someone is a registered voter or not
and it will deny if someone tries to cast a second vote.
Fig. 1: Flowchart of the proposed system.
II. PROPOSED SYSTEM
III. HARDWARE
The proposed system is based on electronic voting machine.
The system is able to identify each voter by getting their A. Controller Unit
fingerprint. Whenever the system will receive a fingerprint, it The controller unit of the whole design is Arduino UNO R3
will match the fingerprint from the database. According to the which is an open source microcontroller. The board is based on
information given by the database, the system will decide if the ATMEGA 32. The board is combined with Analog, Digital and
person is registered or not. System is also able to distinguish Pulse width modulation type signals. In this project, for
second vote. If a particular voter is not registered voter or tries communicating with the finger print scanner, one PWM pin
to cast more than one vote, system will identify him and will and one digital pin was used. For voting pin purpose, the
restrict from voting. However, if neither case is applicable for a analog pins were used as digital means. The code can be
voter, it will allow the voter to cast the vote. The system is downloaded with USB connector [4].
designed in such a way, if vote is given to a candidate
mistakenly, the voter has the ability to change their decision B. Fingerprint Scanner Module
but only once. Furthermore, just like any other electronic The Fingerprint scanner module used for this project is GT
voting machines, the device will count votes for each 511C3 from ADH-Tech [5]. The device is able to capture
candidate. It is also able to show the result, after a certain fingerprint, save it, manipulate it, match fingerprint with the
period of time when the voting is over. This is an advantage database. It has on board 32-bit CPU which accepts code [6]. In

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 2017 IEEE Region 10 Humanitarian Technology Conference (R10-HTC)
21 - 23 Dec 2017, Dhaka, Bangladesh

this project, it is interfaced with Arduino. The module has 4 of a LCD display to guide the voters to successfully cast the
external wires, two of them which communicate with the votes. It also shows if a voter is registered or not. It has 3
arduino. Other two wires are biasing voltage and ground. The pushbuttons for giving votes to different candidate and other
finger print scanner module’s receiving pin cannot handle more one is for showing the result.
than 3.3 volts. That is why a voltage divider circuit was used so
that the finger print scanner can get approximately 3.3 volts.
Other wires were directly connected.

Fig. 4: When the system is turned ON.

Fig. 2: Fingerprint Scanner [5].
Figure 4 shows when the machine is turned on. The machines
IV. SOFTWARE welcomes with a greeting message and the machine is now
ready to go. It is now able to verify voters and count votes.
For controlling the controller unit, which is arduino UNO
R3 with ATMEGA 32 microcontroller, the software from
arduino developer is used. The arduino board can be
programmed with this software. UNO was selected from
Tools>Board menu and ATMEGA 32 was selected for
microcontroller. In case of controlling the fingerprint scanner a
library file was used created and developed by Josh Hawley
[7]. The header file from this library was used to interface the
scanner with arduino and for controlling it. The language used
in the header file is C++.
V. RESULTS
Before proceeding to the hardware implementation part the
simulation of the whole system was done by software. After
successful simulation, the hardware system was build.

Fig. 5: The finger scanning state.

In The figure 5 it shows its second state when is ready to scan a

finger. At this state, the machine search for the finger and if a
finger is put on the scanner, it can detect it.

Fig. 3: Completed Hardware setup.

Figure 3 shows the full hardware setup after completing the

setup. The setup consists of the fingerprint sensor module
which will take the fingerprints from the voters. It also consists Fig. 6: When an authorized voter is found.

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 2017 IEEE Region 10 Humanitarian Technology Conference (R10-HTC)
21 - 23 Dec 2017, Dhaka, Bangladesh

Figure 6 shows when an authorized voter, which means that, if VI. CONCLUSION
a person’s fingerprint matches with the database and if the
specific voter did not cast a vote previously, the machine will To make the voting system of Bangladesh faster and more
the machine will show welcome message to the voter and tell secure, an attempt has been taken so that the voting system can
him to cast the vote. When voter casts the vote, the machine be acceptable to all kind of citizen of the nation. The security
will ask for the confirmation, at this point, the voter has the was the main concern of the whole project. More security has
freedom to change the previous vote if he wants or they can been added compared to usual electronic voting machine by
proceed with the previous vote. After a successful vote casting, adding the fingerprint feature so that there cannot be any kind
the machine will show a confirmation message in the screen. If of cheating. By using this system, the national voting system
a voter, who previously casted vote, again tries to cast vote. will be more secure, faster, easy to use and more economical.
The machine will deny and will say that the person has already The system also consumes very low power and the device is
casted vote. easy to carry. The total cost of one machine would be less than
BDT 5500. In one word, the system will make voting system
more reliable and more secure. It is better than traditional
ballot-paper system. In a country like Bangladesh where
government is trying to bring technologies in every case to
make the country more developed, voting system is a very
good place to apply new technology like this, by which the
common people will elect their right representative in smarter
and secured way.

REFERENCES

[1] Afrina Ali, “Is Bangladesh going for e-voting?”, [Online]

06 February, 2017. [Cited: 4 August, 2017.] Available:
http://www.thefinancialexpress-bd.com/2017/02/06/61143/Is-
Bangladesh-going-for-e-vote [Accessed 04 August 2017]
[2] Remmert, M. (2004): “Toward European Standards on
Fig. 7: Unregistered voter. Electronic Voting”, The Council of Europe [accessed 23
March 2017].
Figure 7 is showing that when an unregistered voter tries to [3] Bhuvanapriya R., Rozil Banu S., Sivapriya P. and
cast vote, the machine will not take votes from that particular Kalaiselvi V. K. G., "Smart voting" , 2017 2nd International
person and will show that they are not registered on the LCD Conference on Computing and Communications Technologies
screen. (ICCCT), Chennai, 2017, pp. 143-147.
[4] Arduino Website
http://arduino.cc/en/Main/arduinoBoardUno [accessed 8
August 2017]
[5] “GT-511C3 datasheet” [Online] Available:
https://cdn.sparkfun.com/datasheets/Sensors/Biometric/GT-
511C3_datasheet_V2.1_20161025.pdf [Accessed 10 August
2017]
[6] “Product GT-511C3” [Online] Available:
https://www.sparkfun.com/products/11792 [accessed 08
August 2017]
[7] “Fingerprint_Scanner-TTL” [Online] Available:
https://github.com/sparkfun/Fingerprint_Scanner-TTL
[accessed 10 August 2017]

Fig. 8: Declaring result.

Finally, when the result button is pressed, the machine will

display on LCD screen, how many vote goes for which team.
It is capable of showing result like and it can also calculate
who the winner is. It can also say that if the result is a draw or
not. In case, no one attended the voting, it will show that no
one voted.

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