Solo: mobile and backend · 2025
Sawt
Automating an election, from voting to results.
An app that digitises the election process end to end: voter registration, identity-verified access, casting a vote and announcing results. Built for transparency at every stage.
Voting is the least forgiving thing to build. A bug in a normal app annoys someone; a bug here invalidates a result and the trust that goes with it.
Sawt covers the whole cycle: voters register and access their account through verified identity, cast a ballot, and results are announced through the same system. The engineering priority throughout was that every stage be verifiable rather than merely fast.
Challenges
One person, one vote, on a device you do not control
Anyone can install the app twice, on two phones, with two numbers. Device-based identity is not identity, and client-side checks are trivially bypassed.
Eligibility is bound to a verified identity checked server-side via OTP, and the ballot record itself enforces uniqueness per voter per election. The device is treated as untrusted throughout.
Everyone votes in the last hour
Election traffic is not steady. It is nothing for days and then everything at once, right before closing. A system that works in testing can fold exactly when it matters.
Writes are kept small and idempotent so a retried submission cannot double-count, and reads for results are served from aggregates rather than recomputed per request.
Results
- Published on Google Play.
- Identity-verified, one-vote-per-voter enforcement on the server.