Design and Implementation of an Electronic Voting System for the Blind Persons

Abstract

Voting is a vital practice in any organized state or group of people since it enables election of potential leaders and expression of people’s view. It is considered a democratic right for each and everyone to vote regardless of their personality. Uganda being an independent state, all Ugandan citizens above the age of eighteen years have a right to cast their vote and in secrecy the blind inclusive.

Blindness is a state where a person is unable to use the sense of sight to their advantage thus can’t see anything. 0.4% of the Ugandan population are blind thus raising a significant alert for fulfillment of the democratic right of voting. In Uganda today, the absence of accessible electronic voting systems for the blind voters has deprived them of their secrecy during voting of their candidates. Though systems like Braille ballot papers, Ivotronic, AVC Edge, eSlate, Vote Trakker and Accue Vote-Ts exist, Uganda is not in position to use them because they are costly. This project presents a simplified low cost electronic voting system for the blind persons. The voting system includes the use of speech recognition technology in real time through the incorporation of Speech To Text and Text To Speech modules, the verification of voters through

bio-metric means by scanning of voter fingerprint pattern, the incorporation of braille technol- ogy through the use of braille keypad and finally the development of a web application that will

act as interface between the users and the system to provide real time feedback. The voting system has the ability to operate in real time, capture voter fingerprint pattern, carry out voter verification and enable voters cast the vote successfully and in secret as well as tally the votes. The completed project is a system where by a blind person casts their vote without help though it has some components where a second party is needed. In instances where a blind person places there finger on the fingerprint scanner and the part of choosing the operation choice to use.