Thursday, August 26, 2010

Feasibility of Online Voting for Political Elections in India


Today I got an email regarding a contest from indiblogger.in

The email says below message.

All you have to do is blog about a technology that you wish existed, or improvements to a technology- it doesn't matter how crazy your idea is!

It looks like they are impressed with Google's contest.

Immediately after reading this message, I wanted to submit my yesterday's blog post about the need for the innovation in Solar Power Sector. Because, I believe there is great need for an innovation in improving the solar devices to make them more useful, and this will give more benefit to the entire world in different ways.

But, I couldn't submit this link as it was already submitted to the indivine.

So, I moved on to next demand. I would like to analyze about the feasibility of Online (Internet) voting for political elections in India.




We are seeing lot of voting systems (including this indiblogger contest) everywhere in internet.

Mostly all Social bookmarking sites (Digg and reddit) are promoting the links based on their vote count only.

I agree that these voting systems are completely different from actual voting in political elections.

But, still there is possibility for successfully running online voting for the elections. The success of online voting in Estonia adds some hope for any large scale implementation of online voting system.

I understand that it is vulnerable to hacker attacks, identity fraud and vote count manipulation.

But, we know that banks and payment processors gained the trust from people for their online transactions system. So, it is not that much difficult to make the online voting system free from hacker attacks and identity fraud.

I agree that computer and internet usage is not reached all people in India.

But, Electronic Voting System is successfully getting implemented in India. Even Election Commission has taken some steps for implementing internet connection in some sample booths for monitoring purpose.

So, the people who are not having access to computer/internet can use computer/internet in booths set up by the election commission. Election Commission should take care of user friendliness of the interface so that the first time computer user can also easily cast their vote online easily.

India's recent initiatives to give unique id number (UID) for each person in India will help to implement this online voting system.

This internet voting option may help to increase the voters turn out in elections. Thousands of people serving in the military and Indians living abroad can cast their vote using internet.

And, even we can include an option to cast vote from mobile phone also. Because in India number of mobile users are more comparing to internet users.

Lot of things should be discussed in detail if we are going to implement this Internet voting system.

  • Online voting system will allow the users to change their vote multiple times even when the final one is considered/taken.
  • Current rules won't allow the election campaign near the election booth. This rule will be violated if we allow internet voting system.
  • We need to decide the best way for voter identification in the online. ie- we need to decide whether we should have ID card and Card reader or just online registration is enough
  • We should have proper policies for Personal identification details while implementing this online voting system.


Still lot of things should be discussed. Obviously it will take siginicant time for implementing it in India even if it is feasible.

You can share your thoughts thro' the comments.

And, now it is your turn to vote for this below Poll.





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6 comments:

Unruly Rebel said...

seriously its most needed thing, to make democracy in real sense every one should be given option of comfrtable voting..
namit..
do visit http://i-am-a-man-namit.blogspot.com/2010/08/fantasy-fone.html

Election System said...

It's about the right time to make use of technology to ensure a fair election for everyone

Anonymous said...

In addition to technology, the entire process of counting must be made visible to the public. Else, what happened in case of P. Chidambaram will be widespread by just tweaking the servers / application. If the counting is not made public, then this technology is highly dangerous.

Ravi said...

HI.
what do you mean by public here? could you be more brief?

Unknown said...

Surely it can be done and a lot of people are demanding it and because of this I've implemented a basic version of it for the General Elections 2014. However it got delayed.....I'll now be modifying it for the upcoming state elections.....Please have a look and let me know your views in the comments section on the site.
Here's the link http://indiavotes.cheraus.com

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