Securing Booth-based Voting System by Integrating IoT and SDN

Voting is a decision-making process where people choose their own representative. The classical booth-based voting system has been in practice for a long time, where voters visit polling booths and cast their votes. However, this system is vulnerable to various types of errors, which can lead to the manipulation of votes and undermine the democratic process. One common scenario is the possibility of uninvited guests disrupting and destroying the polling booth, despite the presence of security personnel. Creating havoc on the polling booths causes loss of money, time, and votes. To prevent such unwanted situations, a secure booth-based voting system is proposed by integrating various technologies like the Internet of Things and Software-Defined Networking. By this model, IoT-based polling booths will accept votes from the voters, and the SDN controller can monitor the polling booths and accept only the valid votes from the validated polling booths. Moreover, all the votes will be stored in a central database as ciphertext with which destroying the polling booth would not harm the already cast votes and also prevent the disclosure of votes from any potential attackers. The proposed model is implemented using Mininet-Wifi, Mosquitto MQTT, and MySQL, and it gives satisfactory results.