A Wireless Voting System Using Wi-Fi-Based Microcontrollers and Face Verification

Abstract

Voting systems nowadays are highly interesting due to their importance in expressing opinions. The proposed work aims to design a cost-effective and reliable Electronic Voting System (EVS) that can tackle the issues faced by manual election. The system uses small and lowcost microcontrollers with Wi-Fi network connectivity to avoid the issues of installing wire connections. Eligible voters are authenticated by recognizing their faces using deep neural networks (VGG-16 model). The Wi-Fi connections between the server and the clients are carried out through the Internet Protocol suite (TCP/IP) transmission method to ensure data arrival without loss. The client’s side comprises four small and cheap microcontrollers known as ESP8266-01, whereas the server side contains one NodeMCU ESP8266-12E microcontroller connected to a program computer. The voting results are displayed using the Visual Basic programming language. The system is specifically designed to facilitate voting on a particular opinion by providing two options: (Yes) and (No). Besides, it can be utilized for electing a committee manager or group leader and can be expanded to accommodate more options. The VGG model’s robustness is demonstrated through experiments, achieving 99.12% accuracy on Faces96 images and 98.61% on our database. Moreover, the practical implementation of the election process demonstrates that the system is highly reliable, secure and cost-effective.