Voting in India to go hi-tech

New Delhi : The Election Commission has collaborated with IIT Madras to work on a new technology which will allow electors to vote from far away cities without going to the designated polling station of their respective constituencies, a senior poll panel official has said.

The project is at present in the research and development stage with an aim to develop a prototype, another official said. Explaining the 'block chain' technology involved in the project, Senior Deputy Election Commissioner Sandeep Saxena said the concept is a "two-way electronic voting system, in a controlled environment, on white-listed IP devices on dedicated internet lines, enabled with biometric devices and a web camera".

He, however, made it clear that voters will have to reach a designated venue during a pre-decided period of time to be able to use this facility. It does not mean voting from home, Saxena explained, which is "anytime-anywhere-any device" and would require some more time and technological advancement.

Explaining the technicalities, the Senior Deputy Election Commissioner told PTI that the "two-way block chain remote voting" process would involve voter identification and authorisation using a multi-layered IT enabled system working on the EC's e-Governance award winning Electoral Registration Officer Network (ERO Net) using biometrics and web cameras.

After a voter's identity is established by the system, a block chain enabled personalised e-ballot paper (Smart Contract) will be generated. When the vote is cast (Smart Contract executed), the ballot would be securely encrypted and a block chain hashtag (#) will be generated.

This hashtag notification would be sent to various stakeholders, in this case--the candidates and political parties, the official said.

The encrypted remote votes so cast would once again be validated at the pre-counting stage to ensure that they have neither been decrypted, nor tampered with or replaced.