Development of Microcontroller Based Electronic Voting Machine(EVM)

Abstract

This paper deals with the design of microcontroller based Electronic Voting Machine. It has the provisions for casting vote among the four candidates by pressing the switches and after completing the voting process total result will be displayed in the LCD. Starting and the ending of the voting process is done by the polling officers. India is world's largest democracy. Fundamental right to vote or simply voting in elections forms the basis of Indian democracy. In India all earlier elections be it state elections or centre elections a voter used to cast his/her vote to his/her favorite candidate by putting the stamp against his/her name and then folding the ballot paper as per a prescribed method before putting it in the Ballot box. This is a long, time-consuming process and very much prone to errors. This situation continued till election scene was completely changed by electronic voting machine. No more ballot paper, ballot boxes, stamping, etc. all this condensed into a simple box called ballot unit of the electronic voting machine. EVM is capable of saving considerable printing stationery and transport of large volumes of electoral material. It is easy to transport, store, and maintain. It completely rules out the chance of invalid votes. Use of EVM results in reduction of polling time, resulting in fewer problems in electoral preparations, law and order candidates' expenditure, etc. and easy and accurate counting without any mischief at the counting centre. It is also echo friendly. Our Electronic Voting Machine is microcontroller based having facility of storing of votes of four candidates by pressing switches, options of display in LCD the votes, total result etc. Fig.1. Block diagram of the Electronic Voting Machine II. Design Of Electronic Voting Machine In this project there are two switches one for starting EVM another for ending the voting process. A set of switches are provided through which a user can cast vote. After every cast of vote, the subsequent count can be seen on the LCD display. The LCD and switches are controlled through AT89C51 microcontroller. In this machine we have the provision of casting votes for the candidates has been provided through four of these switches. These switches are made active high and connected to pins of the controller. These switches are connected in the port 1 of the microcontroller. These switches are made active high. The remaining two switches are to start and stop the voting procedure. These two switches are made active low. The start switch initializes the voting system when pressed, while press the stop switch ends the voting and displays the poll results on LCD screen. These two switches are must not be controlled by the candidate it should be controlled by polling officer. The display device LCD is connected to the port 2 of the microcontroller .