electronic voting machine!!

someone plz give me an idea of building an electronic voting machine(EVM).i want a schematic of already existing voting machine.whr can i get that??i plan to use a microcontroller for this purpose.which microcontroller would be better??the specifications for the EVM are that it must support five candidates and an vote count of 5000.i will be very happy if some one of you share your ideas with me regarding EVM.kindly let me know any sites that i can browse.the project is intended to finish this december.kindly tell me if there are any other simple and interesting projects using micro controllers but within a cost of 2000 rupees(≈50$),plz inform me.all replies are appreciated.kindly help me.thank you.

Hi !

Here in Brazil, all elections use electronic voting machines. In fact they are PCs with a single keyboard (numbers, enter, cancel, blank and null buttons), a display screen where you can see the candidate´s number you have typed and his/her picture and name. The keyboard is enabled by the fiscalization that checks our id and via network communicates with the voting machine. After the end of typing you enter the number and a sound is heard indicating the end. In the end of the day, a file from this voting machine is recorded in a floppy disk and sent to the electoral justice. I don´t have any idea about the inside circuit or software used.

I think you can use a microcontroller to do a very simple voting machine, with a keyboard and a LCD display to show the numbers or names. After, you can communicate with a PC via serial to receive the data about voting.

go through this link **broken link removed**

from my own point of view i dont think you will be able use a microcontroler alone. i think you will need a computer with a database of qualified voters (names, social ID etc) then you can now have a micrcontroller based circuit that can be interfaced to the computer through an RS232 or other IO port.

this is how far i can go for now. i would try and think more on this later.

hope it gets you somewhere

do you want to modify the older version?

Well, many issues involved. Some are :

(a) Authentication of machine.
(b) Authentication of the operator and authorisation to operate. (may be more than one operator).
(c) No existing votes in a blanc machine.
(d) Authorisation to start and stop voting.
(e) Time and location stamp.
(f) Authentication of the voter and permission to vote.
(g) Backup of data.
(h) Authentication for reading casted votes.
(i) Authetication for clearing all data.
(j) Many more issues.
Some of these issues may involve remote systems connected through networks. However, it may be possible to use GPS, smartcatds and biometrics to control some of the issues here. Remote networks may be accessible through GSM / CDMA networks.

The voting system is more of processes enabled by electronics than a simple voting machine. And a fall back mechanism, incase some part of the process fails.

So, first define the entire process and then let us see what all parts of the process need to be enabled by electronics. Cutting edge technology may be totally useless unless it fits into the process.

By the way, elctronically enabling the voting process will require process re-engineering.