The country’s first smartphone-based e-voting solution has been developed by the Telangana government and a dry run will be held in Khammam district soon.
The country’s first smartphone-based e-voting solution has been developed by the Telangana government and a dry run will be held in Khammam district soon. The software helps some voters, including senior citizens, persons with disabilities, those employed in notified essential services, polling personnel, and patients who can’t vote physically.
Technical support for this project was provided by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (CDAC). The development has also been guided by an expert committee comprising professor Rajat Moona, director of IIT-Bhilai and technical advisor to the Election Commission, and professors from IIT-Bombay and IIT-Delhi.
“The solution has been developed and tested. Its dry run in the form of a dummy election will be conducted in Khammam district with the registration on the application open from October 8 to 18, and dummy voting will be held on October 20. Though the initial scope was limited to a subset of citizens, the dry run is open for all citizens of the district,” an official statement of the IT department said.
The initiative was taken by the Telangana State Election Commission which partnered with the IT department’s emerging technologies wing.
Officials said the solution leverages artificial Intelligence for a three-stage authentication of voters. These include the name being matched with Aadhaar, liveness detection of individuals (to keep bots out), and image-matching with EPIC database (with records dating back 15 to 20 years).
Blockchain (distributed ledger) technology has also been used to secure de-identified and encrypted votes so that they are maintained as immutable records. The smartphone application follows a minimalist design approach and supports both English and Telugu, and also has a detailed help section with tutorial videos and helpline number to aid citizens.
Article: First in India, Telangana develops smartphone-based e-voting app