E-voting in India

Subject – Polity

Context–There is no proposal to introduce electronic voting in the upcoming general elections, Law Minister Kiren Rijiju informed the Lok Sabha.

Concept –

It will allow electors to vote from faraway cities without going to the designated polling station of their constituencies.
The voters will have to reach a designated venue during a pre-decided period of time to be able to use this facility.
The IIT-M is developing a system for two-way remote voting in a controlled environment using blockchain technology.
It would entail voter identification and authorisation on the Electoral Registration Officer Network (ERO Net) using biometric data and web cameras for authentication, followed by a blockchain-based e-ballot generation, which would convert into a vote once the hash code would be generated on its execution.
The encrypted remote votes cast would once again be validated at the pre-counting stage to ensure that they have neither been decrypted nor tampered with or replaced.
Countries such as the United States, Argentina, Russia, Estonia, Thailand and South Korea in the past have utilised the blockchain methods for conducting voting processes for their citizens, with a fair share of positives and negatives deriving consequentially.

To know more about Remote Voting, please refer November 2021 DPN.