Application of Biometrics in Mobile Voting

Abstract

Voting process in today's era is behind its time in respect of the usage of modern ICT. The voting process is being seen mostly as a manual and paper based one. This process can be overwhelming, time-consuming and prone to security breaches and electoral fraud. Over the years technology related systems were being developed to resolve some of the issues like electoral fraud, impersonation, double voting etc. One such system is Electronic based voting that has been actively used for voting in countries like India. However, these systems seem to be prone to electoral frauds and voters have to make tremendous effort to cast their ballots. There are still a few very important areas which have to be identified and addressed viz., the Security which involves a person be able to vote in a secure manner, the time spent for voting by voters, the efficiency in counting of votes and the cost involved in employing people towards monitoring the voting process. So taking these areas/issues into consideration we have now come with the biometrics authenticated mobile voting system, to start with for a country like Jamaica. The technology being proposed now is novel and the first of its kind proposed at present. It is proposed that using fingerprint supported biometric control information and encryption along with Secure Socket Layer i.e. SSL using VeriSign, would make the software involved in the voting process well secured. In addition tying the credentials to a mobile device will make the system even more robust. We have considered the mobile equipment for the present system development, a smart phone using Android 3.0 (Honeycomb). The details of the proposed development are presented in this paper.