Design team members: Ching-yen Chen , Saleem Kanji
Supervisor: Professor Kevin Harrigan
Background
Elections held every February allow students to cast their ballots for FEDS next management team. Although FEDS, Waterloo's student union, is responsible for representing student's rights, running critical campus services, and running important support businesses, Waterloo's voter turnout has been traditionally very low.
Last year's voter turnout was a mere 13%.
As more people gain access to the Internet, electronic voting is likely to become increasingly appealing to geographically distributed organizations that currently hold vote-by-mail elections, such as the University of Waterloo.
The University conducts it's elections with polling stations sparsely distributed over a large campus, and in order to allow accessibility to the voting process for co-op students, almost half the student body must vote by mail.
Electronic elections have the potential of reaching out to more people and may even cheaper and less time consuming to administer than vote-by-mail elections.
Project description
The primary objective of this workshop is to design and develop a web based electronic voting system for the Federation of Students.
The principle goal is to have a working system in place by the February 2000 election. This system will not be implemented University wide, but a limited release version with sufficient capacity to conduct an adequate load test will be available online. Between 100 and 200 voters should be to cast their ballot using the (limited release) electronic voting system during the February 2000 election
Design methodology
A web based electronic voting system must meet the following criteria.
- Accuracy
- Democracy
- Privacy
- Verifiability
- Ease of Use
- Accessibility
- Flexibility
- Cost
- Dissemination of information
The following constraints must also be met to ensure compatibility with the FEDS and IST.
- Budgetary
- Time to implementation
- Ease of use for the maintainers
- Technical platforms
The electronic voting system is being developed on the following platform.
- Windows NT Server 4.0
- Internet Information Server 4.0
- Microsoft Access 97 Database
- ActivePerl for Win32 (CGI scripts)