Election Process - A Technocrat's View

Susma Sharma *

I am very happy that I could cast my Vote in the 10th General Assembly Election recently held in our State. I was lucky enough to cast the vote as my date of joining as System Engineer in Infosys Training Centre, Mysore got deferred by a month from January last week to February last week. Actually this is the first Election held in our state after I became eligible for voting and the best part is that I used an EVM in my first experience. It was nice to see the modern technology in the voting process. I really appreciate the Election Commission of India in giving lots of efforts to prevent proxy voting. I hope the process of taking photos of the voters by the poll personnel have prevented such things to a certain level.

I am neither a regular writer nor so good in creativity, still I don't know why I felt like writing this time. It may be because I have used my technical knowledge (which I love to apply) in writing this. Apart from the huge success on the part of the ECI, I got certain issues raised in my mind and I would like to share those here. Are all the voters happy with the new system? In fact did the new system bring any difference to the voters? After casting my vote, I was checking various news channels to get news updates about the election process going throughout the state, and then I came across news brought by the NETV where the voters complained that they had to wait for 3-4 hours to get their turn to cast the vote. Is it fair enough to make them wait for so long? Don't the voters have any other work and devote the entire day for voting? As I was coming out after casting my vote, I remembered one lady asking me if the queue was manageable enough, she was saying "If the queue is manageable enough then I'll cast, otherwise I have some important work so I'll go back". Here I can't blame her to be an irresponsible citizen because her work may be really important. In other hand I got a thought in my mind, are all the voters standing in queue happy to stand for so long? Don't they have any other important work? They certainly have, but they are helpless, they have to stand. Even my 80 yr old grandfather also stood for his turn for four hours continuously (7 to 11). Can all 80+ voters stand like that? The other issue which rose in my mind is the efficiency of the process of taking photos of the voters. In the present scenario, suppose if someone comes with some other's card and a different look (a hair cut or bandage on face) then the actual identity of the person cannot be detected and he still may cast a vote. On giving a serious thought over the issues and the present scenario I have come out with my idea of making the system more efficient and fool-proof (as I claim).

In the new system the use of manpower can be reduced by more than 50 percent and the waiting time of the voters can be reduced by 10 times or even more. In the proposed system the ECI have to make use of the biometric details (including finger prints) of the voters. The biometric details can be easily sorted out from the population database as collected by the UIDIA (Unique Identification Authority of India).

Let me illustrate the proposed system in the following steps

1. The ECI should collect the biometric details (name, constituency, age etc including the finger prints) of all the eligible voters i.e. those whose age is 18 yrs and above, from the UIDIA.
   
   
2. In each polling station, there must be a server (machines) that contains all the details of the voters under that station.
   
   
3. Ten or more Point of Service (POS, consisting of EVM in each one) will be connected to the server. The voters will use the POS to cast their votes (i.e. at a time 10 voters can cast their vote).
   
   
4. At each POS, there will be installed a scanner device that takes the finger print of the voter and only after verifying the voter he can cast his vote. The verification takes place in the following way -
   
   
   • System takes the finger print and sends it to the server.
     
     
   • Server matches it with the list of finger prints available (those of eligible voters).
   
   
   
   • Once the user is found eligible(eligibility stands true only if his name is in the database and have not casted vote earlier on the same day) he can continue with the process, otherwise the process stops and the user has to exit immediately.
   
   
   
5. After being verified as an eligible voter, the voter can cast his vote using the EVM installed at the POS.
   
   
6. After the user once casts his vote his name will be removed from the list (Master list retained), thus preventing that person to cast vote anymore.