August 13, 2020
India’s Election Commission (EC) is now considering the likelihood of incorporating distributed ledger technology (DLT) into the nation’s election procedure to make it promising for residents to vote remotely in a secure manner.
India may adopt blockchain for voting
To eliminate geographical obstructions in the campaigning process and make it possible for citizens to vote seamlessly from wherever they are across the nation, Indian authorities are now brooding on whether to adopt blockchain technology.
India’s Election Commission (EC) officials led by Commissioner Sushil Chandra held a gathering on August 10 to discuss how the voters can overcome geographical obstacles and cast their votes securely and transparently.
On a similar note, in most jurisdictions, voters must cast their votes from the same geographical area as the particular location where they conducted their voters’ registration. This makes it difficult for a voter to partake in voting when he or she is away from that location when the election happens.
Blockchain to the Rescue
To eliminate this congestion, the Election Commission and the Tamil Nadu e-Governance Agency (TNeGA) met via a webinar to deliberate the likelihood of executing a remote voting system that could support “live, auditable, transparent and frictionless” voting.
Umesh Sinha, EC Secretary-General said:
“Today our process is tied up to a geographical location. I am sure we can work out this [blockchain] technology. The big challenge is to formulate a secure, safe, and reliable system. This is a massive task, however, it will facilitate easy participation for voters who are unable to visit the polling station during elections.”
Notably, Chandra has clearly stated that while developing a remote voting system is vital, and the nation must carefully examine the drawbacks of DLT, including scalability issues.
Principal Scientific Adviser to the government Vijay Raghavan, says he believes in the probability of blockchain. However, the DLT-based remote voting system must first be rehearsed at the foundation on a small scale, to assess its efficiency before executing it at the national level.
Blockchain technology is progressively being discovered for remote voting across various jurisdictions; however, recent research proposes that there is more work to be done before the growing technology can be used for multifaceted elections.
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