Guided by the necessity to hold polls in India under the shadow of the Covid-19 pandemic, the Telangana State Election Commission is set to conduct a dry run of a system which can facilitate voting using their smartphones from the confines of their home.
The proposal has got the Telangana government’s approval and the dry run will be held in the Khammam district on October 20. This will be the country’s first smartphone-based e-voting process. According to a report by The Indian Express, voters can register themselves using the smartphone application between October 8 and 18. The state election commission is implementing the system in collaboration with the emerging technologies wing of IT Electronics and Communications (ITE&C) department of the state government and the technical development by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (CDAC).
The system will use Artificial Intelligence for a three-factor authentication of a valid voter. It will match the voter’s name with his Aadhaar, detect individual liveness and match the image using EPIC database consisting of around 20-year-old records.
“Blockchain (Distributed Ledger) technology has been used to secure the de-identified and encrypted votes so that they are maintained as immutable records. The smartphone application follows a minimalist design approach and supports both English and Telugu, and also has a detailed help section with tutorial videos and helpline number to aid the citizens,” said the report.
It claimed that the mobile app called ‘TSEC eVote’ is a security-hardened mobile application and will prevent tampering. It cannot be misused as it binds a device ID and phone number to a specific citizen registration process and the same device can be used during voting. All the processes can be tracked and monitored by the admin using a web portal and the entire data will be stored in the state data centres (SDCs) as an added security consideration.
Read More at https://www.financialexpress.com/india-news/vote-using-your-smartphone-telangana-to-test-indias-first-mobile-based-e-voting-system-on-october-20/2345902/