In the era of remote access riding on digital interventions – from transferring funds to tele-teaching and tele-health – digital interfaces in the electoral process cannot stay far behind, especially in a democracy. In a bid to address this, the Telangana government is implementing a first-of-its-kind e-voting or electronic voting solution in the country. This is ideally meant for anyone unable to reach the polling booth or prefers to cast his or her vote remotely.
The focus initially however, is not for everyone but to those who are physically challenged, elderly and ailing. That it is based on blockchain technology makes it more secure crucial in an electoral arena, where there could be a tendency to manipulate voting.
Explaining the process, Rajesh Dhuddu, VP & Practice leader – blockchain and cybersecurity, who has studied this e-voting project, says, it cannot be done at random and every person keen on taking part in e-voting needs to pre-register with his or her voter ID and with yet another identification, which could be an aadhaar card. They need to have this matched with their selfie.
That is where the blockchain also comes handy. He says, if any fake ID is created then the ‘hash’ value (a unique number generated by the algorithm) will not tally with the details already stored in the system about the individual (voter).
The technology for this is coming from CDAC along with expertise tapped into of couple of IIT (Indian Institute of Technology) professors. It is currently being piloted in the khammam district of Telangana with the voter registration on for this from today (October 8 th) to October 18 th and will be followed by a dummy election in an apparent bid to fine-tune the solution. Attached is a demo video put out on this by the state government.