Design and implementation of electronic voting machine on FPGA
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Date
2008-10-21
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Abstract
Although many western countries such as United States of America, Germany, The Netherlands and France use electronic voting machine for their elections, third world countries are yet to switch to electronic voting machine. The fear may be that the existing electronic voting machines are sophisticated to use and expensive to procure. The work describes user study done on design and implement of an electronic voting machine.
A prototype voting machine consisting of enable button, four voting buttons and four display buttons is implemented on field programming gate array. The machine, which has an enable light emitting diode-light that shows up when it is enabled by depressing of enable button, allows a voter to vote once when enabled. The machine has a common display, which shows the total votes cast at the polling station at any time, and shows a contesting party’s votes when his/her display button/switch is depressed.
Test voting performed on the machine, using a sample size of 30 people from the university community, indicated that all votes cast were correctly recorded and tallied. The machine gave accurate results on the votes cast and these votes were immediately known, when they were shown on a display by the depressed of display buttons. Thus, collation of results can quickly and readily be done. The design has an external memory which stores votes cast so that in the event of recount, it can be fallen on to clear any doubt. This capability will assist in the problem of vote recount. Also, the voting machine is transparent in its usage since it shows total votes cast at anytime for onlookers and officials. Above all it is simple to use.
Description
A Thesis submitted to the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering,
Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science, 2008