Secured E-Polling distributed computerized system for

Sri Lankan government elections using

Windows Communication Foundation built on top of
Microsoft .NET Framework

Name : Amila Perera

Date : 2021-03-26
Cardiff Student ID : ST20188567
ICBT Student ID : CL/BSCSD/20/04

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Ethics Form

When undertaking a research or enterprise project, Cardiff Met staff and students are obliged to
complete this form in order that the ethics implications of that project may be considered.
If the project requires ethics approval from an external agency such as the NHS or MoD,
you will not need to seek additional ethics approval from Cardiff Met. You should however
complete Part One of this form and attach a copy of your NHS application in order that your
School is aware of the project.
The document Guidelines for obtaining ethics approval will help you complete this form. It is
available from the Cardiff Met website.
Once you have completed the form, sign the declaration and forward to your School Research
Ethics Committee.
PLEASE NOTE:
Participant recruitment or data collection must not commence until ethics approval has
been obtained.
PART ONE
Name of applicant: Amila Perera
Supervisor (if student project): Mr. Priyanga Siriwardena
School: International College of Business & Technology
Student number (if applicable): ST20188567
Programme enrolled on (if applicable): BSc (Hons) Software Engineering
Project Title: Secured E-Polling distributed computerized system
for Sri Lankan government elections using
Windows Communication Foundation built on top
of Microsoft .NET Framework
Expected Start Date: 28/03/2021
Approximate Duration: 2 months
Funding Body (if applicable): Not Applicable
Other researcher(s) working on the project: Not Applicable

Will the study involve NHS patients or staff? No

Will the study involve taking samples of No

human origin from participants?

In no more than 150 words, give a non technical summary of the project
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An online system, which involves procedures like registration of voters, vote casting, vote counting,
and declaring results, etc. would constitute a good solution to replace the current process in Sri
Lanka.

Moreover, the proposed system will also decrease the risk for corruption. It starts with an
automated registration system that will provide the secured database of the voters’ information.
Voter details will be stored against their national identity card number in the main database. The
election commission, authority is authorized to access the details, but they aren’t authorized for
modifying or changing the details. Modification of the voters’ information requires the national
identity card number of the voter.

Does your project fall entirely within one of the following categories:
Paper based, involving only documents in the Yes
public domain
Laboratory based, not involving human No
participants or human tissue samples
Practice based not involving human No
participants (eg curatorial, practice audit)
Compulsory projects in professional practice No
(eg Initial Teacher Education)
If you have answered YES to any of these questions, no further information regarding your project
is required.
If you have answered NO to all of these questions, you must complete Part 2 of this form

DECLARATION:
I confirm that this project conforms with the Cardiff Met Research Governance Framework
Signature of the applicant: Date: 2021-03-26

FOR STUDENT PROJECTS ONLY

Name of supervisor: Date:
Mr. Priyanga Siriwardena

Signature of supervisor:

Research Ethics Committee use only

Decision reached: Project approved
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 Project approved in principle
Decision deferred
Project not approved
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Signature:

Details of any conditions upon which approval is dependant:

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PART TWO
A RESEARCH DESIGN
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project?
A2 If yes, please state the name and code of the approved protocol to be used1
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A3 Describe the research design to be used in your project
In this section, include details (as appropriate) of:
- research method(s);
- sample and sampling;
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If your project does involve the use of an approved protocol, much less detail will be required
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A4 Will the project involve deceptive or covert research? Choose an item.
A5 If yes, give a rationale for the use of deceptive or covert research
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B PREVIOUS EXPERIENCE
B1 What previous experience of research involving human participants relevant to this project
do you have?
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B2 Student project only
What previous experience of research involving human participants relevant to this project
does your supervisor have?
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An Approved Protocol is one which has been approved by Cardiff Met to be used under supervision of designated
members of staff; a list of approved protocols can be found on the Cardiff Met website here
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 C POTENTIAL RISKS
C1 What potential risks do you foresee?
Include details of risks to the participants, the researcher and the project as a whole.
C2 How will you deal with the potential risks?
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When submitting your application you MUST attach a copy of the following:
• All information sheets
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Refer to the document Guidelines for obtaining ethics approval for further details on what
format these documents should take.

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Contents
Ethics Form ..................................................................................................................................... 2
Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 7
Purpose........................................................................................................................................ 7
Objectives ................................................................................................................................... 8
Problem Statement ...................................................................................................................... 8
Literature review ........................................................................................................................... 10
Research Gap ................................................................................................................................ 11
Solution ......................................................................................................................................... 12
Required tools and availability ..................................................................................................... 14
Software Resources ................................................................................................................... 14
Hardware Resources ................................................................................................................. 14
Schedule ........................................................................................................................................ 15
References ..................................................................................................................................... 16

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Introduction

Purpose

In the new era of advanced technology where the online system boosts work speed, reduces
mistakes and promote the generation of accurate results, having manual election system becomes
a misfortune. A public election system constitutes the backbone of a democracy where the
people have to elect their state’s leader. Sri Lanka currently uses a manual election system,
which causes several kinds of problems. Due to this paper ballot based electoral system, some
problems are faced by voters before or during elections and others are faced by the
administration before and after the voting.
An online system, which involves procedures like registration of voters, vote casting, vote
counting, and declaring results, etc. would constitute a good solution to replace the current
system the system proposed in this thesis will be helpful for the voters by using any resources
like their own system or arranged by the Government.
Moreover, the proposed system will also decrease the risk for corruption. It starts with an
automated registration system that will provide the secured database of the voters’ information.
Voter details will be stored against their national identity card number in the main database. The
election commission, authority is authorized to access the details, but they aren’t authorized for
modifying or changing the details. Modification of the voters’ information requires the national
identity card number of the voter.
So, the system will help to minimize the corruption done by others, and hopefully corruption
may be diminished at some point of time. In this system, Voter will select his/her preferable
candidate by providing his or her opinion on a screen where all candidates’ voting sign is
displayed. I have proposed the basic structure and functionality for such a system.
The system was developed as an interactive mechanism between the user at the interface and the
database using the WCF service. This tool enables a user through a sever to interact with the
Microsoft SQL Server to add, update, view and delete such data as per the privileges granted.
These activities were achieved using JSON and C# languages. Windows forms offer the best
layout to enter data, change and view the database. These forms were also kept as short and
simple as possible for easy public awareness on the use of the tool.
Google Chrome as the main browser and accessible on the World Wide Web; other web
browsers such as Mozilla Firefox, Opera and Internet explorer are also applicable. The
implementation and deployment were made successfully using N-tier architecture. security and
accessibility to the system is ensured.

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Objectives

The specific objectives of the project include:

• Reviewing the existing/current voting process or approach in Sri Lanka.

• Coming up with a distributed e-polling system in Sri Lanka.

• Validating the system to ensure that only eligible voters are allowed to vote.

• To ensure confidential and integrity of the election process.

• To organize fair elections for both candidates and voters.

Problem Statement

Elections are playing a vital role in modern democracy. It’s the form of transferring power of
citizens into their representatives. Sri Lanka, being the oldest democracy in south Asia, is still
using old traditional paper-based election system. We have seen over the years that the process
of manual election system, from registering voters, registering candidates for voting, counting
processes has been carried out across almost by the Sri Lankan Election Department.
At the present a day’s registering voters are a hard process that takes too much of the time and
cost of papers in the process are significant. When it comes to registering candidates still it has
been manually inside the Election Department that has drawbacks of time consuming,
information security, integrity can be compromised and also all the process is maintained by
human who are always not good with justice this could be a disadvantage for some candidates.
Finally, a critical process of polling is voting for the election and its processes and drawbacks
are;
1. Voting process: Identity of the voter is still uncertain, moderate possibility of rejecting
votes, possibilities of forgery voting.
2. Counting process: can make human errors while counting, too much of time consuming,
inefficient resulting in the false counting
3. Other process: high transportation cost, too much of manual verification process

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The problems of the existing manual system of voting include among others the following:

• Expensive and Time consuming: for example, time and money is spent in printing data capture
forms, in preparing registration stations together with human resources, and thereafter advertising
the days set for registration process, including sensitizing voters on the need for registration, as
well as time spent more to do this manual process.
• Too much paperwork: The process involves too much paper work and paper storage which is
difficult as papers become bulky with the population size.
• Errors during data entry: Errors are part of all human beings; it is very unlikely for humans to
be 100 percent efficient in data entry.
• Loss of registration forms: Sometimes, registration forms get lost after being filled in with
voters’ details, in most cases these are difficult to follow-up and therefore many remain
unregistered even though they are voting age nationals and interested in exercising their right to
vote.
• Short time provided to view the voter register: This is a very big problem since not all people
have free time during the given short period of time to check and update the voter register.
• Intelligibility: When a system based on pens, stamps, punch cards or ballot papers is used for
voting in a Paper‐based Polling System, the result can be ambiguous.
• Accessibility: Disabled or duty‐bound people do not have an easy access to the poll booth, but an
easily system will help them to cast their vote.
• Transparency: Chances of manipulation of the results from influencing authorities will almost
be finished.

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Literature review

According to Ariyadasa (2021), the traditional paper-based election system is now out of date
and only fewer countries are using it. A e-polling system can produce effective and efficient
results withing minutes. The method of e-polling is cost savings, increased participation rates,
reduced administration, create and deploy ballot quickly and with ease, integrity of the vote,
elimination of human error in the vote counting, etc… Security and usability are main factors to
measure the success of any election system. In e-Voting system, there are standard securities to
protect from unauthorized attackers. Also there are some third party software which can track
malicious attacks as well. Therefore, with the available security features, e-Voting is considered
as secure voting system. Usability is also a factor to consider, because the election system means
all most all the citizen in a country may use it. Therefore, when designing a ballot, disable
people, old people, non-educated people and nontechnical people have to be considered.

E-Voting is timely technique that Sri Lanka can use to replace the current election system. It
carries many advantages over currently used traditional voting method. But there are things to
consider, when Sri Lanka moving to e-Voting system. Some of main factors are, proper security
standards, usability testing and the manufacture of the system. Also according to Sri Lankan
computer literacy rate, both methods should carry some time for few elections until people get
used to it.

As per The Indian express (2021), the election chief said electronic voting systems will
replace the current manual paper voting, for which the Indian government's assistance would
be taken, in the next provincial polls, dates for which have not yet been announced.

Chandani (2021) mentioned that using information technology, E-voting system can cast and
count votes with higher convenience and efficiency, even make the electoral procedures simple
and reduce the mistake rate of ballot examination. Due to construct an E-voting system with
practical utility, at first, I compared many E-voting systems clarify the existing problem. Over
the years, the scholars are addressed their concept of e-voting, they integrated information
technology to satisfy the characteristic of election such as uniqueness, accuracy, completeness,
verifiability, privacy, and enforceability. But most of these researches focused on designing
encryption algorithm, a usable and applicable implementation is rarely.

Despite claims of discrimination and security hazards, the future is bright. Clearly, initial
attempts at electronic voting will need to be paralleled with traditional methods, both for the sake
of allowing voters maximum access, and for providing a backup in case of technical error.

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However, it is likely that ultimately advances in technology and legal precedent gained over the
course of a “trial period” will pave a more explicit legal path for electronic elections to follow.
In this paper Kazim et al. (2021)has discussed, the principles of blockchain and machine
learning to provide protection and integrity to the voting system are proposed to create a
stable and efficient E-voting system architecture. This proposed system not only deals with
the integrity of votes but also secures citizens' data as an E-voting station network. We used
two machine learning models with a different set of settings. One is the Gaussian Vector
Support Machine, and the other is the linear Vector Support Machine. A comparison is
made between these two classifiers by measuring their accuracy and AUC (area under the
curve). The idea of a smart contract is used to register voters and to receive votes as well.
Where the Merkle root algorithm has been used to get the root hash to ensure the integrity
of the data stored at the citizen's data centre. We believe that this voting architecture can be
extended as an I (internet voting) where users can vote through a secure application or
secure web servers.

Research Gap

It was observed that Sri Lanka currently doesn’t have a e-polling system for election purposes.
With the current on going pandemic, the government had to change their normal patterns of
voting.

This caused a lot of confidentialities among the citizens, therefore it is better to use a e-polling
system which can be used by everyone .

There are not many researches done on e-polling in Sri Lanka as the procedure has not being
implemented. Therefore, to fulfil the gaps noted this project will be implemented.

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Solution

In E-Polling Distributed System Grama Niladhari registering voters' list into the server, after that
process election department staff registering candidates into the server. Qualified voters are
voting through the provided system by election department and that system collecting vote
information and upload it into the server. The election result function will collect and generate
result set of the specific year and only commissioner of the election can have access to the
election results.

Figure 1: Problem Solution Architecture

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Electronic polling is a distributed computerized system. This e- polling systems consist of three
main election processes.
1. The voter registration process performs by Grama Niladhari
2. Candidate registration and information managed by the election department using
computerized distributed e-polling system
3. Electronic voting system
Here are the advantages of e-polling distributed system.
• Totally paperless work.
• Time consuming.
• No forgery while voting.
• Easy to manage large amount of user and data store in electronic for a long time.
• The project is mainly aimed at providing a most secured and user friendly.
• Display voting results in a graphical fashion and instantly display results for the administrator to
analyze.
• Prevent voters from voting more than once for them choose candidates.
• This system will count the votes automatically.
• The counting process will be faster and that will help to publish the result faster.
• Ensure eligible voter can vote.

But the modern technology is improved to provide faster, better, cheaper vote counting, and have
stimulated great interest in managing the election process through the use of electronic polling
system. in now a day, many democracies have adapted electronic voting systems, and the
number of deployed systems is rising. Although the electronic polling has gained popularity and
users, it is a great challenge to provide a reliable system. The electronic polling system has many
advantages over a traditional election system. Therefore, it will be a needful replacement for the
future of Sri Lankan democracy.

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Required tools and availability

Software Resources

i. Microsoft SQL-it allows combination, extraction, manipulation and

organization of data in the voters’ database. It is platform independent
and therefore can be implemented and used across several such as
Windows, Linux server and is compatible with various hardware
mainframes. It is fast in performance, stable and provides business value
at a low cost.
ii. Microsoft Visio-Under System Analysis and Design stages there are
numerous diagrams to be drawn. In order to meet the professional quality
and standards, all the diagrams should be drawn in international
standards. Microsoft Visio professional 2010 edition will be used to full
fill this requirement.
iii. C# and Jason - language to develop the software
iv. Visual studio-to create interfaces
v. Web browsers: Mozilla Firefox, Google chrome, Opera and Internet Explorer

Hardware Resources

• Computer
• 4 GB of RAM

• 5 GB of free Hard Disk Space

• 7200 RPM Hard Disk Drive

• 64-bit Processor

• Internet connectivity

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Schedule

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References

• Ariyadasa, S., 2021. Applicability of an Electronic Voting System in Sri Lankan

Context. [online] Ijsrp.org. Available at: <http://www.ijsrp.org/research-paper-
0216/ijsrp-p5045.pdf> [Accessed 26 March 2021].
• The Indian express, 2021. Sri Lanka to seek India's help in introducing electronic
voting systems. [online] Available at:
<https://www.newindianexpress.com/world/2019/oct/16/sri-lanka-to-seek-indias-
help-in-introducing-electronic-voting-systems-2048574.html> [Accessed 26 March
2021].
• CHANDANI, J., 2021. A STUDY OF INTERNET VOTING FOR THE ELECTIONS OF
UNIVERSITIES IN SRI LANKA. [online] Dr.lib.sjp.ac.lk. Available at:
<http://dr.lib.sjp.ac.lk/bitstream/handle/123456789/6099/A%20STUDY%20OF%20I
NTERNET%20VOTING%20FOR%20THE%20ELECTIONS%20OF%20UNIVERSITIES%2
0IN%20SRI%20LANKA.pdf;jsessionid=59B9995A50E76414EFADBF72E298CA8D?seq
uence=1> [Accessed 26 March 2021].
• Kazim, M., Azar, A., Cheema, M., Ashraf, N., Aftab, A. and Qureshi, H.,
2021. Machine Learning with Blockchain for Secure E-voting System. [online]
Ieeexplore-ieee-org.ezproxy.cardiffmet.ac.uk. Available at: <https://ieeexplore-ieee-
org.ezproxy.cardiffmet.ac.uk/document/9283806/authors#authors> [Accessed 26
March 2021].
• Tokaji, D., 2021. The Paperless Chase: Electr aperless Chase: Electronic Voting and
Democr oting and Democratic Values. [online] Ir.lawnet.fordham.edu. Available at:
<https://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4064&context=flr>
[Accessed 26 March 2021].

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