As they say, the LSA elections get better and better every year and this year we, Shubhangam and I, revolutionized the system by carrying out the elections electronically instead of the ballot paper method used every year.
Finally, the much awaited Computerised Voting System (CVS) was ready. It was tried, tested and implemented successfully in the school today. The council elections were carried out in a much smoother and modern way. We saved on time, effort, paper and whole lot of sweat. This was the first time in India that such a thing was done, and while being modern and user-friendly, it was also eco-friendly as it saved a lot of paper that would have been used up as ballot paper.
Earlier, the voting used to be carried out as follows - the ballot papers would be issued to all the students, the students would fill in their chosen nominees, the voting would be held where the students dropped their ballot into a ballot box. Then, the ballot box would be opened, and the ballots would be counted by hand. Their was a lot of margin - for error, corruption and cheating.
Now, students came class by class, selected their candidates, hit vote and returned to their class. As soon as all students had voted, the Voting Overseer logged in using the administrator account and was able to obtain the result at once, and that too in a visually appeasing manner.
Main Screen
CVS consists of the following sections -
» Voting Area
The Voting Section of the respective houses is accessed with the help of a unique authentication code which was provided to the students by the teacher-in-charge. This screen consisted of the respective House Captain and Vice Captain nominees together with the candidates of the Head Council. The voter would hereby select their chosen contestants for each post and then press the Vote button and hence, the vote would be recorded.
Vote Authentication
Voting Screen
The Vote Password Section is used to set the initial password for the vote authentication and this is auto-incremented by a fixed number which is pre-decided and coded in after the casting of each vote.
Voting Password
» Admin Area
The Nominee Details section has the option to edit the various candidate's details and is used to set up the contestant's information before the election. It allows for the setting up of the First name, Last name, picture path and whether the entr is enabled.
Nominee Details Page
The Result Section comprises of 2 options - the Vote Detail and the Council Tree section.
- The Vote Detail section comprises of a screen similar to the voting one with the contestants' names, pictures and votes received and the names are arranged in order of votes received, i.e. the one with the highest votes is on the left side.
Vote Details Page
- The Council Tree section comprises of a screen with a "Reveal Post" button, on clicking this, the school council is revealed one by one in a tree form.
The DB Merge section is for merging the databases of each house into one compiled database for the viewing of the comprehensive results after a voting session.
DB Merge
The Reset Votes section is to be accessed before the start of a voting session to reset all the votes and set them to 0. This can be done for all posts, or a specific house, as the user wishes.
Vote Reset
The Administration section allows the changing of passwords for the admin and house login usernames and displays the access level granted to each.
Administration Area
CVS was developed by Archit Tantia(me) and Shubhangam Agrawal jointly over a period of 2 months with Visual Basic as the programming language.
This software had a nice media coverage also:
(click on the pictures for a bigger view)
Hindustan Times News Article
Times of India News Article
Telegraph - Metro News Article
Dainik Vishvamitra News Article
For more information on this software please contact me through my contact form.