India’s first mobile-based e-voting system developed in Telangana

Telangana announced on October 6, 2021, that it has developed India’s first smartphone-based-e-voting solution, in the face of the Coronavirus pandemic that has rushed the entire world into all-digital operations.

According to an official release, the solution has been successfully developed and tested while a dry run, in the form of a dummy election, is being conducted in the Khammam district in the state. The registration on the application for the users is open from October 8-18 and the dummy voting will be taking place on October 20.

The release further added that even though the initial scope was limited to a subset of citizens in the state, the dry is open for all the citizens in the district.

The Telangana State Election Commission developed country’s first smartphone-based e-Voting Mobile Application with the support of Information Technology (IT) Department of Telangana Government and Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (CDAC). https://t.co/pBCZgsg9VO pic.twitter.com/QI8nxNlqf2

— Collector Khammam (@Collector_KMM) October 8, 2021

TSEC eVote: What do we know?

• TSEC eVote Android app, which is to be used for the dry run, is a security-hardened mobile app to prevent tampering. It also binds the device ID and the phone number to a specific citizen registration process in such a way that only the same device can be used for voting, thereby enhancing security.

• The entire process will be monitored and controlled by the admin using a web portal. Additionally, the entire data will be stored in the state data centres as an added security consideration.

India’s first mobile-based e-voting system: Objective

The initiative of digital voting originated from Telangana’s State Election Commission’s plan to enable an ‘e-voting’ facility to a certain section of the voters such as senior citizens, persons with disabilities (PWD), sick people, individuals employed in notified essential services, IT Professional, polling personnel, besides others.

Key Highlights

• The Telangana State Election Commission has taken the initiative with the implementation support of the Emerging Technologies Wing of the state’s IT Department, as well as the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing.

• The technical development of the system has also been guided by an expert committee. It comprises of Director of IIT Bhilai and Technical Advisor to Election Commission of India, Professor Rajat Moona, and professors from IIT Delhi and IIT Bombay.

• The solution to facilitate e-voting leverages emerging technologies such as Artificial Intelligence and Blockchain (Distributed Ledger) Technology.