HYDERABAD: If all goes according to plan, Telangana would become the first state in the country to experiment with online voting in the upcoming Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) elections likely to be held in December. The state election commission (SEC) is planning to implement e-voting for senior citizens, the physically handicapped and polling personnel as a pilot project.
It was only in February, just before the lockdown, that the Election Commission of India and IIT-Madras had announced that they were working on an e-voting project using blockchain technology.
Telangana state election commissioner C Parthasarathi said the commission, in coordination with the state information technology department, has started work on the project.
IT secretary Jayesh Ranjan said they are studying a model developed by Estonia, one of the first countries to launch e-voting. Ranjan said that once the project is implemented, people can just sit at home and vote.
There could be a gap of a few days between polling and counting of votes, and keeping the polled e-votes encrypted and convincing political parties that it is a foolproof system and cannot be tampered with would be a tough task.