Preferential Voting System: An Extensive Study of Global and Indian Practices Suggesting Intelligent System Design

This paper examines the importance of voting and voting system in a democratic country. The electors play an active role in governance decisions and processes. Unintentional under-votes, over-votes and votes for the wrong candidate greatly impact the elections. The section intends to address the preferential voting process where voters mark the preferable candidates in the order of their choice, highlighting its significance. Moreover, the research discuss the steps involved in proportional voting, its types such as Alternative Vote, Single Transferable Vote, Open-List, and Flexible-List, used in countries around the world. It aims to discover the existing practice of a preferential voting system in forming governing bodies in India. A significant research gap is found in the literature review on designing and implementing electronic voting machines for preferential voting. Therefore it is strongly believed that promoting novel research in this context shall transform traditional voting practices into advanced technology like the Internet of Things (IoT) that can leverage voters access their voting rights in a careful vigilance, from anywhere in the world abiding the security concerns and Edge computing facilitating the end devices perform a speedy complex computation without human intervention. These design suggestion can be incorporated through careful training and guidance to the citizens.