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  Voting Interface for Students

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  Graphical Vote count

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  Tabular Vote count

The School Senate Voting Interface

Introduction

The School Senate Voting Interface is an application that aims to facilitate the annual school event of senate elections. Traditionally, this event would have been facilitated by papers and ballots or Google Forms/Basic program-based applications. The School Senate Voting Interface (SSVI) was hence formulated to give schools a better interface with features such as graphs, organized catalogs, and an overall visual experience.

What It Does?

SSVI does more than just calculate and display the number of votes a certain candidate has won. The breakdown of what it does can be divided into three categories, applicable to both the teachers' and students' voting lists. The first phase involves adding all the possible voters, teachers and students alike, who are cataloged based on their names, class, and most importantly admission numbers for the students, at the same time, names and department for the teachers. This makes up the directory that the application refers to in the course of its execution. It holds all the records, profiles of the voters. Similarly, for the candidates, there is a directory for holding records such as their name, class, a position they are running for, and an optional candidate icon/image. The second phase is the voting process as a whole. The interface for voting is displayed on the screen, where the voter either enters their admission number or selects their department name for a student and a teacher respectively. Once this is done, it displays the details attached to the record associated with the entry. This is followed by the interface where the votes are entered. The voter is allowed to choose their candidate for each position, and once they confirm, their vote has been made. The third phase is what sets SSVI apart from the traditional ways. This involves three things: The real-time vote count, the voting status, and the disabling of future votes from the same system. The real-time vote count can be viewed either as a graph or a table which can be viewed only by the administrator in charge of the application. The voting status changes from pending to voted on the directory once the vote has been made, making it clear for the administrator. It also shows how many voters are yet to cast their vote. Finally, the disabling of future votes from the same system ensures that no voter makes a false vote using another voters' identity. Going by the policy of one system one vote, this ensures a fair voting environment.

How We Built It

Zoho Creator is a cloud-based application used to develop this voting system. Coded using Deluge Script, the application's functioning is easy to understand. For each branched interface, and the three different phases mentioned above, there is a set of codes that help in executing them. A menu-driven application like this involved five main parts namely the Dashboard, the Teacher and Student Voting Forms, Candidates form(for two placements), under which there were sub modules for related activities.

Challenges We Ran Into

The first obstacle before the SSVI even took its baby steps was that there was no transparency in how the school voting process worked. This was later shared to us and helped us proceed to formulate a course of action to develop the application. The second obstacle was to decide what details were important to ensure that only minimal information from the end-user was taken, to assure the safety of their data. This was easily overcome when it was decided that the admission number for students and the department for teachers were sufficient. The final obstacle was the image uploading code as it was not a feature of Zoho, and was new to us. This was overcome with help from our mentors, youtube videos, and documents from Deluge.

Accomplishments

One of the main accomplishments we consider is the fact that the school promised to use this application for the upcoming senate elections. This privilege we believe is the show of trust in our skill, and also the first step for our application as a solution. Though this is the only big accomplishment we consider, we are in line for more such accomplishments, after further development and refining of the application. One more accolade is that this was our first time making a cloud-based application, and it works smoothly. This we are proud of.

What We Learnt

Through the course of coding, we were able to learn more about Deluge Script. The greatest take-back being the knowledge of image insertion using a program. We were also able to experiment and explore the features of Zoho Creator, and using this we were able to enhance our application. Moreover, as an overall learning experience for all members of the team, which comprises of novices and experts in terms of application design. The drawbacks of traditional voting systems in schools and much more were made clear to us as we embarked on this quest to find a solution.

What's Next

There is scope for development obviously. One aspect we noticed was that in case of an emergency situation, the administrator gets the power to completely halt, or reset the voting system. This would be a safety measure. Further developments in the display aspects are also something that we aim to achieve soon.

Built With

• deluge-script
• zoho-creator