Background

The current administrative processes, particularly elections for Gymkhana secretaries, are often characterized by procedural complexities, potential vulnerabilities, and fragmented workflows, resulting in multiple delays and issues in administrative processes. This not only poses challenges for the Gymkhana authorities but also impacts the student community in terms of transparency, accessibility, and timeliness. Recognizing these challenges, this PS aims at developing a proof-of-concept novel solution to the problem.

Objectives

• Secure Elections: Develop a decentralized election mechanism that ensures the integrity, transparency, and security of the voting process. The solution should mitigate traditional vulnerabilities associated with centralized systems, offering a robust, trustless alternative that instills confidence in the electoral process.
• P2P Collaboration: Establish a peer-to-peer network infrastructure that fosters collaboration among participants, ensuring direct and secure communication. This decentralized model aims to eliminate dependencies on centralized servers, enhancing scalability, and resilience.
• User-Centric Design: Prioritize an intuitive and user-friendly interface that caters to the diverse needs of both Gymkhana administrators and the student body. The platform should be accessible, navigable, and conducive to fostering a sense of inclusivity.
• Innovative Electoral System: Design a novel electoral mechanism like multi voting, or quadratic voting into the election mechanism to enhance the process.

Challenges

• Algorithmic Innovation: Devise/use novel algorithms for the P2P network like blockchain that underpins the entire platform, ensuring optimal performance, fault tolerance, and data integrity in the face of dynamic and diverse network conditions.
• Trustless Verification: Develop a robust mechanism for certificate verification that leverages cryptographic techniques, providing a trustless environment where the authenticity of certificates can be independently verified by stakeholders.
• Security and Privacy: Address the critical aspects of security and privacy, implementing encryption protocols and authentication mechanisms to safeguard sensitive data and communications across the platform.
• Scalability: Engineer the platform to accommodate the evolving needs of the student body, Gymkhana authorities, and potential future integrations, like addition of new gymkhana positions, without compromising performance.

Rules

• Don’t use any kind of paid/cloud-based products (like AWS, Google Cloud, MongoDB Atlas, Azure, Firebase) in your solution. Try to use scalable database services like MySQL, SQLite.
• Plagiarism is not allowed. You can use open source licensed code, however.
• Decision made by judges is final.

Submission

• Source code
• PDF Report
• Demo video

Evaluation Criteria

• Ease of Use: Evaluate the user-friendliness of the voting interface to promote widespread participation. (10%)
• Result Accuracy: Verify the accuracy of the election results produced by the novel voting mechanism. (20%)
• Prevention of Manipulation: Examine the system's resilience against manipulation or strategic voting. (20%)
• Long-Term Sustainability: Evaluate the platform's readiness for long-term use, including its capacity for updates for new positions in gymkhana, new councils, and improvements over time, preferably using some form of admin dashboard rather than tinkering with the codebase. (20%)
• Novelty: Consider the innovative aspects of the quadratic voting system, assessing how it introduces novel elements or approaches to enhance the election process. (30%)

The Gymkhana Election Platform aims to improve the electoral processes, creating a secure and transparent environment for elections. It’s success depends on innovative algorithms, thoughtful ideation, and addressing challenges in P2P networked systems.