Online Voting System - Secure Election Platform

A complete, self-hosted online voting platform built in PHP and MySQL — for student councils, departmental associations, clubs, and any organization that needs a secure, professional way to run elections.

Set it up in minutes with the guided installation wizard, or explore it immediately with the included one-click demo data. Two portals — Admin and Voter — share a single, unified login screen, and every significant action is captured in a full audit trail for accountability.

Export election results and voter reports to PDF, Excel, or CSV. Send voters their login details and election announcements automatically by email (Gmail SMTP) and SMS (Arkesel gateway) — no manual configuration beyond an address and an API key. Candidate profiles support photos, bios, manifestos, and campaign details, with a clean profile page for each one.

Built with vanilla PHP (no framework dependency, no heavy ORM) for a lightweight, easy-to-read, easy-to-customize codebase — see the Requirements and Instructions tabs for full setup details.

Earn from your elections with the built-in sponsor ad system. Sell top and footer banner space to sponsors, site-wide or for a single election, and choose how ads appear from the admin panel: a static banner, a slideshow, or auto-sliding banners that move left-to-right or right-to-left (or fade). A live preview, configurable timing, arrows, dots and pause-on-hover are included, and the banners are responsive on desktop, tablet and mobile. Ads never appear on the ballot page itself.

Features

- Guided 5-step installation wizard — no manual database setup required - Optional one-click demo data to preview the product instantly - Unified single login (admin username or voter Student ID, no portal picker) - Unlimited elections, each with its own positions and candidates - Rich candidate profiles: photo, bio, manifesto, campaign slogan, achievements, department/level - One vote per position per voter — enforced at both the application AND database level - Live admin dashboard with real-time charts (votes by candidate, turnout donut) - Full audit log of every admin action (create, edit, delete, publish, login, export) - Export election results and voter reports to PDF, Excel (.xlsx), and CSV - Real Gmail SMTP email sending (just an address + App Password, no host/port setup) - Real SMS sending via the Arkesel gateway, with full delivery history - Bulk "Send Logins to All" — generates and delivers fresh credentials to every voter in one click - Custom broadcast messaging (email and/or SMS) to all voters or just those who haven't voted - Login rate limiting with configurable lockout thresholds - Hardened sessions (HttpOnly/SameSite/Secure cookies, server-side idle timeout) - Real image-content verification on uploads (not just file extension checks) - Fully responsive — tables collapse into clean cards on mobile instead of squeezing columns - Editable branding: organization name and logo, no code edits required - Clean, documented codebase with no external database ORM dependencies

- Sponsor ad banners (site-wide or per election) with impression and click tracking - Admin-controlled ad display: static, slideshow or auto-sliding, with slide direction, fade, timing, arrows and dots - Modern responsive ad design with a live preview in the admin panel

Requirements

- PHP 7.4 or higher (PHP 8.x recommended) - MySQL 5.7+ or MariaDB 10.3+ - PDO MySQL, mbstring, and JSON PHP extensions (standard on virtually all hosts) - cURL and GD extensions recommended (SMS sending and upload validation) - Apache with mod_rewrite, or an Nginx equivalent - A Gmail account (for email notifications) and/or an Arkesel account (for SMS) — both optional and free to start

Instructions

1. Upload the package contents to your web server. 2. Ensure these folders are writable: uploads/, uploads/candidates/, uploads/voters/, uploads/branding/, uploads/temp/, logs/, and the project root. 3. Visit yourdomain.com/install/ and follow the 5-step wizard:    - Requirements check    - Database connection details (created automatically if it doesn't exist)    - Schema install, with an optional demo data toggle    - Create your own admin account    - Done 4. Delete the /install folder once setup is complete. 5. Log in at yourdomain.com/index.php. 6. Configure Settings → Email (Gmail) and Settings → SMS (Arkesel) to enable notifications.

7. Add sponsors under Admin → Sponsor Ads, and choose how they are displayed under Display Settings. Full documentation, including manual installation steps, is included in /docs.