GROUNDBREAKING: Graduates develop a cell phone voting system

Telecommunication and Information Engineering graduates Peter Waiyaki and Constantine Ingumba say the system they have developed will let voters remotely using their cell phones to vote.

The unique feature of this system is cross-platform that accommodates any type of phone whether a smartphone or not.

All that is needed is mobile network connectivity with any operator.

The technology on which this system rides on is Interactive Voice Response System (IVRS) and Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD). All a voter needs is to register using their ID and phone numbers as the unique identifiers, which are matched in the database, with a system generated pin assigned to each registered voter.

“On the poll date, a voter is given a toll-free number that they call. On connection, the voter is prompted to enter the unique pin that they were registered with. This is for authentication purposes,” Ingumba said.

Once the system has verified that the caller is the legitimate voter that was registered, the system then retrieves the candidates to the voter by sound. The voter is then guided through on the choices of the candidates.

“For instance, to vote for Peter press one, to vote for Matthew press two, to vote for Constantine press three. Once the voter has made all the choices, the system then gives them a chance to confirm on their choices before doing the final transmission,” Waiyaki explains.

Upon transmission of their choices, the tally of the particular candidate chosen increases by one in real time. This means no manual tallying, no form filling and no long waits to know the winner.

The system does the tallying in real time. This is visible on an online portal. This system has also been implemented using USSD, which is text in order to accommodate those with hearing impairment and those in noisy places where the IVRS voice is not clearly audible.

With proper implementation, it could see a seamless voting process and increased voter satisfaction