Voting is a complicated yet hugely important process in the democratic world. The Mera Vote application allows Indian citizens to understand what they are voting for, and they can cast votes while considering things like security, fake voters, voting verification, etc. It will provide an easy way for people to vote in STATE or NATIONAL elections.
Mera Vote
In collaboration with Anshuman Sathe, Hetal Rathi, Santoshi Balaji and Shreya Kulkarni
Timeline: 01 Week
Our app attempts to make the entire electoral voting process in India more secure, accessible, cost-efficient, convenient, and comfortable with the ease of being at home. It will allow citizens to vote fairly and make choices without external manipulation and influence. The voting space in the app will be safe, anonymous, auditable, and verifiable. It will also cater to the needs of differently-abled people by providing election assistance through voice -based commands. It provides multiple levels of security with an individual’s voter ID, biometrics including fingerprint, and an iris scanner. The digital platform will save the overall election cost and will limit human intervention at various steps. Humans might wander away from their duty and can be manipulative sometimes, but so is not the case with our digital app. It will allow multiple users to vote from different locations simultaneously.
Narrative
Concept note
Voting is a fundamental right of any citizen; thus, it is crucial to ensure that the citizens of a state can exercise this right effectively and with ease. Currently, in India, the process of voting is cumbersome and inaccessible, subject to loopholes and manipulation at almost every step. Keeping this in mind, we attempt to create an application that simplifies the voting process and gives the citizens of India an accessible platform that allows them to vote securely and smoothly.
Characteristics of the voting system
No other person should be able to tell how a voter voted. Even bulk statistics, such as correlating votes with language, should not be exposed. The only acceptable information disclosure should be the final vote total for each area.
Lack of Evidence: The voter should not be able to prove which way he/she has voted. Together with the privacy condition, this prevents vote-selling and coercion. If there is no way to assure a third party of which way a vote has been cast, bribes and threats are ineffective.
Fraud-Resistance: Each qualified voter should be able to vote exactly once, and no other persons should be able to vote. The system must verify the identity of each potential voter.
Ease-of-Use: Elections must serve the entire public. This includes people with various levels of technological familiarity, various languages, and various physical capabilities (vision, hearing, etc.). Any systemic bias in the error rates between these groups could unfairly alter the election results. Additionally, each voting station's poll workers have minimal training and technical skills. Setting up and administering the system must be simple.
Large elections must serve millions of people. The system must scale to handle these elections as well as smaller precinct-specific ones.
That the EVMs used in the General Elections are tampered with to favor a candidate/political party by altering the results stored in the EVMs after the polls.
Current Voting System: The voting procedure as well as the election of candidates, is based on the first-past-the-post (FPTP) system—electors vote for one candidate in one constituency among all those contesting the elections from that constituency. The candidate with the highest number of votes, irrespective of the margin of victory or percentage of votes polled, is declared the winner.
Challenges - EVM
Voting is trivialized, and as a result, there is a lack of genuine investment and enthusiasm in the process.
Verification documents tend to be non-inclusive and all encompassing simultaneously: What does a citizen do in the absence of an Aadhar card? A lot of legal identification documents systematically do not include already marginalized communities and assume a level of economic independence that requires a person to have a permanent address and access to identity proof in the first place (According to 2018 Times of India reports, 88% of people to have Aadhar card). Duplicate voters; not enough verification for identity. Can there be some continuous verification of identity in the absence of Aadhar? (e.g., updating passport info every five years, updating address info, etc.)
Lack of learnability among people to learn and adapt to the use of some other kind of voting medium.
Lack of trust in Electronic/ app-based voting systems due to the fear of electronic threats and information leakage. EVMs also need to give immediate and accurate feedback to the voter. EVMs are manipulated at every step of the voting process.
Using portable hardware to change the vote records in the EVM machine.
Attacks through radio signaling by using wireless devices like phones sneaking them into polling places is not a new issue.
The voter registration list needs to be updated regularly, and some of the names are removed without any prior information, leading to duplicate and false votes being counted.
Speed: They can register only 5 votes per minute.
Problems have been taken demonstrated in the past with EVMs, which involve replacing a small part of the machine with a look-alike component that can be silently instructed to steal a percentage of the votes in favor of a chosen candidate. These instructions can be sent wirelessly from a mobile phone. Another attack uses a pocket-sized device to change the votes stored in the EVM between the election and the public counting session, which in India can be weeks later. Interventions will have to be made between voting and counting to reduce the number of votes being tampered with.
The tampering of votes also happens during the voting process, when buttons can be manipulated to correspond to different parties/ candidates than those labeled beside them. Thus, interventions will have to be made to ensure that such manipulation does not occur in the app. Immediate feedback should be given to the voter after they cast their votes.
Mobility in Voting - Voters in India are forced to gather around different centers and go through 'n' a number of processes to get to the polling booth and vote finally.
Due to inaccurate feedback and an unclear interface, people unfamiliar with the voting process might cast an accidental vote or vote by mistake for a candidate/party that they do not support. Can relevant information about the voter's constituency and the candidate representing that constituency also be provided on the app at a specific time (maybe a month) before elections start?
Overall expenditure on elections: Given India's size and population, the elections are costly. The elections are conducted a year thrice, and the amount is spent on human workers, booths, maintenance of the EVMs, voter list preparation, counting centers, etc. The overall expenditure is in crores. Also, the 2014 elections in India were considered the most expensive election in Indian history.
Here is the link to the research survey - https://goo.gl/forms/tP2CoS8SdEWk642v1
Use-Case and Flow
Accessibility
Language Localisation
For the differently abled, audio interaction is provided. The chatbot asks the citizen if they are in a secure private environment and then proceed with the rest of the process.
Security
The app will require the Voters' ID to sign into the app. An individual cannot sign in more than once. If done so, a red notification will appear saying that a vote has already been registered. No copy-paste option will be available to the users. All of this will be secured by a 256-bit encryption system.
As this app is linked to our Aadhar, all the details will be available directly. The app can be an inbuilt application on all phones, and when the users turn 18 years, they will get a notification that their name has been added to the list of voters. Application for a Voter ID can be made on the app itself.
How will the System Work: Since the app requires a user to sign in using their Voter ID that can be utilized only once per voting cycle, the voter data and their vote are possibly saved on the backend. To maintain anonymity, the app has two processes running simultaneously - one to verify the voter's identification data and another to count what party/candidate has received how many votes.
Verification methods required to sign in: Voter ID > Fingerprint Screen Scanner > Iris Scanner > Logs In. Aadhar will need to be linked to the app, which is pre-installed on the phone. The app will send the user a notification asking them to link their Aadhar details to the app, a notification that will be repeated every election cycle. This linking allows the app to keep track of the individual's security, verification, and biometric data. If the individual is under 18, the Aadhar biometric data ensures that the app sends a notification when they turn 18 to sign up for their Voter ID.
In addition to Aadhar, the user can upload any of the twelve official documents that can be used as verification. These documents will have to be updated regularly and consistently.
