<aside> ✅ Panjab University gets EPVM Patent - TribuneIndia.com
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I worked on this project with my undergrad professor, Prof. Manoj Kumar Sharma. Our work on creating the prototype for this invention went in support for the Indian Patent 352158 being granted.
A brief overview of the design:
This project relates to elections in which Preferential Voting System is adopted and counting is based on Single Transferable Vote method. In such elections, more than one candidate is elected out of the contesting candidates.
In election, where only one candidate out of number of contesting candidates is to be elected existing Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) are used. However, in case of election in which more than one candidate is to be elected and Preferential Voting System is used and counting is based on Single Transferable Vote method, the existing EVMs cannot be used. In such election, manual voting is done and manual counting is performed to obtain the results.
The present mechanism of carrying out preferential voting involves a highly tedious task of casting votes, where ballot paper of the size of a newspaper is used and counting process takes days to complete. An Electronic Preferential Voting Machine would eliminate the problems faced in the process and also ensure that the highly complex counting process is carried out in an error-free and transparent manner.
Our task was to design the hardware and OS of the machine, and optimizing the vote-counting algorithm which was written in MATLAB.
This is what our bread-board prototype looked like:
The bottom section emulates the “Control Unit” and the top section emulates the “Ballot Unit”. A voter can input their voting “preferences” using the buttons available on the Ballot Unit, which are only activated by the control unit. Preferences get stored on an SD card, which can be serially read by a computer running MATLAB to produce election results.
Here’s a glimpse of the final prototype, off the bread board and on PCBs. Our design included support for ballot chaining as well. If the number of candidates contesting couldn’t fit into one ballet, we could chain up to 16 ballets together to support more candidates.