SPECIAL REPORT After the date 16th May 2014 is arbitrated as the judgment day, the ballots from Five Hundred Forty Three (543) parliamentary constituencies will come together to decide the contender for the Prime Ministerial seat in Lok Sabha parliament.
To clamp down on illegal or wayward action, Election Council of India has ensured that the voting is carried out in nine long phases starting from 7th April 2014 to 12th May 2014. With such a schedule, this proves to be the longest election in Indian history till date.
This year Election Commission of India (ECI) has launched a few IT centered initiatives to appeal to voters of all groups alike to cast their ballot and exercise their franchise. Last year’s Ananda Babu has been altered to Ananya this year, which is an audio-visual campaign run by the Election Commission of India.
In 2011, ECI had proposed to offer photo-slips which were used for voter identification on the polling day. Photo-slips are reserved as a pictorial identification of the voter with detailed information like their name and polling center. Earlier, in each election, political parties would send out the slips which assisted the voters in finding out their room number in the polling center, and locate their name in the voters list.
And on the polling day, the voters had to carry such slips and produce them in front of election staff. The staff or police personnel would tear the perforated portion of the slip, where the party symbol was printed. “You could see the Booth Level Officer (BLO) handing out the photo slips where you would find your photograph along the additional information, but this year as an improvement, we are introducing some slogans and messages on the backside of the slip to persuade more people to vote” explained Amitjyoti Bhattacharji, Asst Chief Election Officer, Election Commission of West Bengal.
Another initiative by ECI to encourage more voters is in the form of “Awareness Observer” across the country. Bhattacharji, Assistant Chief Electoral Officer explained that, “Two Awareness Officers have been allotted to West Bengal from Election Commission of India. One has already visited this place, and the other one has to still start his journey.” ECI has sent a compendium of instructions to the state election commission to allocate one Awareness Officer to each constituency, but only two officers are accountable in West Bengal. The Awareness Officer has been entrusted with paying visits to each constituency to compile a report detailing the voting numbers and explaining the reasons for high or low voting patterns.
To make the election drill more accurate, ECI has ordered 20,000 voter verifiable paper audit trail (VVPAT) systems. This paper trail system had already made their debut in Nagaland and Mizoram as an experiment last year. This year, this paper trail system will be making their way to as many constituencies possible. “When a voter presses the button to cast his or her vote to elect favorable candidates, an imprinted paper with name and symbol of the party will briefly appear for about 10 seconds and after that will fall into a secure box” Bhattacharji said in a conversation.
When he was asked about this strategy, he said, “On many occasions, we had witnessed that voters wonder if their votes are being counted in favour of their preferred contender; in this regard, this VVPAT system can actually hasten a re-count.” Among the 42 constituencies in West Bengal, only Jadavpur constituency has been singled out to introduce the VVPAT system. The system was improved upon by the Bharat Electronics Limited, Bangalore and the Electronics Corporation of India Limited (ECIL).
After the schedule notification of the Lok Sabha election was released, registered voters had innumerable queries about the polls. So to answer their questions, ECI equipped the voters with a toll-free number (1950) which they can dial in to ask questions regarding the enrollment process, change of address and correction of mistakes. “We are receiving a great number of calls per day, and our people are attending to everyone’s issues, fixing them as soon as they can” confirmed Bhattacharji.
Call centers are established in every state where call attendants enlist callers’ queries. Along with the toll-free number which ECI has validated, SMS service for the voters has been started. One can know his polling station by sending their EPIC number to 98560-66666. Bhattacharji mentioned, “The voters will be notified of such details as the location of their polling station and their serial number in the electoral rolls.”
Apart from the SMS service, ECI inserted ‘Find Your Polling Booth’ option on its official website. “Those who want to locate their polling booths can directly log into the Chief Electoral Officer’s website and use the interactive map facility in it”, official sources here said. If one touches the ‘find your polling booth’ tab, the exact location of the booth and its route will appear on the screen. “Voters can search for the booths by entering their electoral photo ID card number or by selecting a district along with details like his name, house name and so on”, they said.
In Kerala, with 2,888 stations, northern district of Malappuram constituency tops the list, followed by Thiruvananthapuram and Ernakulam —2,178 and 2,027 polling booths respectively. Kerala has a total number of 2.42 Cr voters, including 1.2 Cr women this time.
These are the pre-preparation techniques which have been taken by ECI. However, the real deal is the way ECI is going to keep a watch on the on-going operation of Lok Sabha election, 2014. ECI is working on preparing a network to capture the behaviour of sensitive areas across the country. LMSA (Live Monitoring of Sensitive Areas) is an operation which will use a van with a fixed dome camera mounted on the vehicle.
During the nine phases of election hours, this OV van would be moving outside the polling stations and taking images of the movements outside the areas of the polling stations. When Bhattacharji was inquired about the importance of this step, “This system is designed to monitor processes in the critical areas which were previously identified as shadow areas, as the snapshots taken by this Van will come directly to the District Election Officer (DEO) Chief Election Officer (CEO) of every state as well as the Election Commission of India through a server installed in the van.
This is called Live streaming of data from the place of occurrence”. He claimed that, “this facility would be distributed to every state depending on the criticality of assembly constituency in a state affair.”
Sector officers are allotted an Android phone so that their activities can be tracked. They are ordered to take photos of and inside the polling stations and send them to the higher officers. “These are some non-CRPF measures that are taken by Election Commission” cleared Bhattacharji. These are some of the critical measures that have been taken by the Election Commission of India in this year’s Lok Sabha elections. “To deploy law and order, we would be doing anything and everything” assured Bhattacharji.
With the Election Commission taking up cudgels to ensure a free and fair election, we, as citizens, must not shy away from our duty of using the election day to go out and exercise our franchise. Let’s vote.
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