State Election Commission comes up with unique smartphone-based e-voting solution

Hyderabad: The State Election Commission (SEC) has come up with a unique smartphone-based e-voting solution considering Covid has rushed people across the world into all-digital operations.

This is said to be the first such initiative, which the SEC has brought in with the support of the Emerging Technologies Wing of the IT department and the technical development by Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (CDAC).

The initiative originated from the SEC's plan to enable 'e-Voting' facility to certain sections of voters such, as persons with disabilities, senior citizens,those employed in notified essential services, sick people, polling personnel, IT professionals.

The SEC partnered with the emerging technologies wing, whose mandate is to support the govt tech projects, to initiate the development and deployment of project on a pilot basis by leveraging emerging technologies to ensure it meets the strict requirements of voting process.

The solution has been successfully developed and tested, and its dry run in the form of a dummy election is being conducted in Khammam district with the registration of the application open from October 8 to 18 and the dummy voting on October 20. Although the initial scope was limited to a subset of citizens, the dry run is open for all citizens of the district.

The solution leverages Artificial Intelligence for a three-factor authentication of valid voter viz. Name Matching with Aadhaar, live detection of individual and image matching with EPIC database (with up to 15-20 year records).

Further, 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.

The 'TSEC eVote' Android app, to be used for the dry run, is a Security Hardened Mobile Application to prevent tampering and also binds a device ID and phone number to a specific citizen registration process such that only the same device can be used during voting, thereby enhancing security by design itself.

The entire process can be monitored and controlled by the administration using a web portal, wherein the generation/access of results is further protected with the requirement of a physical security token based decryption. Additionally, the entire data is being stored in the State Date Centres (SDCs) as an added security consideration.