Bihar becomes 1st state to adopt e-voting system for urban polls

 In a paradigm shift to the voting process, the Bihar State Election Commission has decided to roll out an e-voting system using an Android-based mobile. Bihar will be the country’s first state to adopt this revolutionary change in the voting process. Talking to Akashvani News, State Election Commissioner Deepak Prasad said the initiative will start with the upcoming municipal and urban body polls scheduled on 28th June in the state. Mr Prasad said the entire e-voting process will be executed through two mobile apps, namely “e-Voting SECBHR”, one developed by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) and another by the Bihar State Election Commission.

The State Election Commissioner said so far 10,000 electorates have registered for e-voting and 50 thousand electorates will be able to exercise their right to vote via e-voting and without visiting polling booths. He said the biggest benefit of this initiative will be in many aspects. He said migrant labourers, migrant voters, divyang voters, pregnant female voters, elderly and senior citizens, and seriously ill electorates will be able to cast their votes using the e-voting process. The SEC said it will help to increase voter turnout and make elections more inclusive. He said fool-proof digital security has been ensured. The e-voting system will have features like a blockchain platform, liveness detection, face match, live face scan, and face comparison, making the voting tamper-proof. Like EVMs feature of VVPAT, an audit trail has also been put in place in the e-voting proces

e-Voting will be another feather in the cap of the Bihar State Election Commission, which is a pioneer in adopting end-to-end digital technology in the polling process. The State Election Commission has so far introduced the FRS- Face Recognition System for voter verification, the Optical Character Recognition system in counting of votes and declaration of results and the use of digital locks for EVM strong rooms, making a role model for others in the democratic process. The State Election Commissioner said, as per information available on e- e-voting process, only the European country Estonia has rolled out this.