Did you know that in 2010, the Gujarat State Election Commission – with help from Tata Consultancy Services – set up an online voting system for the civic elections in Gujarat? Don’t worry, neither did I. The system required you to personally visit the SEC office to register yourself and obtain a password. On voting day, you were to log in to the voting website using this password. Upon confirmation that he/she wants to vote, a code would be sent to the registered voter’s cell phone by way of SMS. This code once entered would result in the electronic ballot paper opening on the screen. The voter then casts his vote. The response towards the online voting system was dismal (only 182 qualified online voters), however, it is considered as a critical step into a modern India.
A company called Midac was responsible for the first time people voted online in 1995 - ‘CyberVote’ as they called it - as part of a petition regarding French nuclear testing in the Pacific region. The European Union launched the CyberVote project in September 2000 with the aim of creating a secure and reliable online voting system that maintained utmost privacy of voter information. In France, too, remote electronic voting over the Internet was used for the first time in 2003 when French nationals living in the USA elected their representatives to the Assembly of French Citizens Abroad.
Democracy is becoming more and more inclusive. Elected representatives are more accountable as the general public is more in tune with governance and current issues in India. Recently, Prashant Bhushan of the Aam Aadmi Party suggested that in an online survey India should let the people of Kashmir decide whether they want the army to protect them or not. Before each election, news channels come out with their own reports of exit polls predicting the results to questions like “Should Arvind Kejriwal be CM?” Nobody really had a way to know if these were accurate or just a way to mislead the public into voting for said party. What is the guarantee that if you were to do an authentic country-wide online survey India would express the same conclusion? Now, knowing the majority’s views on such current issues in India Could be made a little simpler, with the advent of the ‘public opinion app’
‘abcd’, has been created for the Indian context – it basically records responses to questions that are imperative to the functioning to a state or the nation. Questions are instantly transmitted and the data collated within hours. This simplifies and speeds up the opinion polling process for a generation of young Indians whose lives have been busied by the nation’s rapid integration with the global economy.
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