This application was designed to provide the Electoral Commission of each country with a system that will offer OFFLINE processing for the casting of citizen votes in conjunction with a periodic ONLINE connection to a secure Server installed and commissioned by the Electoral Commission for the feedback of encrypted votes already cast. The system facilitates Presidential, Parliamentary & Council Elections. This application will be available for Local Citizens, Residents and Absentees of a country.
Each citizen will be required to be issued with a smart card on which all their personal and voting registration information is captured. All ten fingerprints of the Citizen will be taken at Card Registration, Enrolment and Smart Card Issuing converted to detailed templates and stored in the EEPROM of the card. Personal date of each individual is stored on their smart card.
The system provides a fully auditable, accurate and secure smart card identification, qualification and monitoring voting system.
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Control of Age-Group permitted for Voting
- The “Date of Birth” is stored on the citizen’s smart card.
- As the card is inserted into the POS terminal, an internal check is made using the system encrypted on the IEC Operator Card against the birth date recorded on the citizen smart card. If the age-group calculated is incorrect, the transaction is rejected and the smart card will be marked accordingly. This eliminates the current problems of citizens not eligible to casting a vote.
Secure citizen identification:
Positive fingerprint verification at the voting POS will allow the citizen to cast their vote and eliminate the issue around stealing cards and trying to use other family member’s cards.
Electronic Voting in respect of Absentees
As the Voting Application has no monetary value involved with the application, it is easy to provide ABSENTEES living abroad the facility to register for their client smart cards at their respective country’s Embassy offices worldwide. The Embassy offices would be equipped with the Registration Kit as well as the Voting Kit.
Accurate Electronic Voting for Citizens and Absentees using Offline Transaction Processing:
All eligible citizens and absentees can cast their votes electronically OFFLINE at voting UEPS terminals situated at Electoral Voting Stations thus speeding up the voting process and eliminating costs associated with stationery, printing and management of voting papers, spoiled votes etc. As the system offers OFFLINE – REAL TIME transaction processing, it eliminates costly network infrastructure. Periodic online connections to submit feedback records of votes cast is required.
Convenience of Voting anywhere irrespective of where citizens reside:
As all personal data is stored on the smart card, the casting of votes will not be restricted to regions, districts, provinces etc. The card will only allow the political party candidates of the specific region written to their smart card to be displayed on the POS voting flat screen, therefore eliminating the need of having to vote at your area voting station. Those citizens that have changed their physical address to different regions/districts must be advised to change this information on their citizen card before voting commences. Changes should not be allowed during the voting period.
Elimination of Citizens casting more than one vote:
Once the various votes have been cast, the client card voting wallet is flagged as “VOTED” and the card cannot be used again to cast their vote irrespective of trying at another polling station, region or district.
Elimination of the need for Citizens to Re-Register for new election periods:
The client smart card will carry all personal data including the REGION/DISTRICT/PROVINCE in which they reside. A citizen that has moved REGION/DISTRICT OR PROVINCE will need to update their client smart card accordingly, in order to cast their vote for the correct REGION/DISTRICT/PROVINCE at the next elections.
The card will identify the activation period of the VOTING WALLET and when last utilised.
Security of Votes Cast:
No candidate selections are stored on the client cards. The vote is encrypted and recorded on the IEC OPERATOR CARD but not linked to the particular citizen’s card. A CITIZENS VOTE IS STRICTLY CONFIDENTIAL.
The system on the IEC Server/Government Server will hold the keys to continuously perform the decryptions of the encrypted data and have a running total split by the various candidates and regions. On completion and settlement of the last Operator Card, results will be available for the IEC/Government to announce. |
