Why Not Vote Through ATMs?
The Chief Election Commissioner has recently stated that the EC is planning to use web and mobile based technology to allow citizens to cast their vote in local and national elections. Is this feasible? Will it be fair? Or secure? The challenge is indeed daunting but let us see how we can leverage an existing technology infrastructure to reach this goal easily and at a very low cost. Online voting is not a new idea. The Computer Society of India and many public limited companies are already using the internet to allow members and shareholders to vote by logging into websites. The challenge is to make sure that only those who are authorised to vote are allowed to login to the site and this is ensured by sending unique userids and passwords by email. Obviously this assumes that every member of the electorate has a valid and validated email ID. But this would not be true when we consider the kind of people who are voting in panchayat, municipal, state legislature and Lok Sabha ...