Design and implementation of an electronic voting system for optimal electoral process

Electronic voting is a tool for increasing the credibility and efficiency of elections in several democracies around the world. In Nigeria, many elections have conducted sub-optimally due to the manual methods employed in voting and transmission of election results. In such cases, electoral officials have been accused of colluding with politicians to alter election results while the results are being transmitted from polling units to results collation centres. To address this problem, this paper proposes and presents a framework for electronic voting and transmission of election results. The proposed system is designed and implemented using a C++-based Visual Studio Integrated Development Environment (IDE) and a MATLAB/Simulink application. This setup allowed for the simulation of the voting process, encryption of voting data, transmission of voting results and decryption of election results. The simulation-based results obtained for the proposed system was compared with that of the existing system. The results indicate that for sample sizes ranging from 2,000 to 7,000 voters, the proposed system accurately accredited an average of 85% of voters, compared to 73% for the existing system. Specifically, for 2,500, 4,000, 5,500, and 7,000 accredited voters, the existing system had 684, 1,095, 1,505, and 1,916 failed voters respectively. In comparison, there was a significant reduction in the number of failed voters for the proposed system and this stood at 364, 582, 801, and 1,019 respectively. Additionally, the quality of verified feedback for 3,000, 4,500, 6,000, and 7,000 accredited voters showed that the proposed system had quality scores of 0.362, 0.138, 0.019, and 0.000, compared to 0.549, 0.197, 0.024, and 0.001 for the existing system. In conclusion, the proposed system has proven to be highly effective, credible, secure, and transparent in safeguarding the integrity of the electoral process and it is therefore recommended for hardware implementation in subsequent general elections.