The growth in technology has drastically changed the way people used to work in previous years. It has changed the way we shop, study, interact with our peers, etc. Recently the Telangana government has thought about bringing a change in the way people vote using Blockchain technology. Blockchain technology can be defined as a simple, decentralized, distributed ledger technology that records the provenance of a digital asset. Blockchain has found wide applications in different sectors like banking, ride-sharing, hedging, etc.
As the initial step, this technology could be experimented on a small scale of the learning process and later scaled up. This Blockchain technology will help voters vote remotely without the risk of privacy breaches. Jayesh Ranjan, Principal Secretary of Information Technology on speaking about this initiative in a recent webinar said that al the state governments can come together and put together technologies like facial recognition software and encryption to make the remote voting technique more effective. The state governments can also convince smaller bodies like society, sports, and other cultural organizations to conduct their internal elections using blockchain technology. This can help the governments to have a model to conduct large elections. Once enough use cases are generated in the state levels national elections can also be conducted using this technology. Technology is ‘never’ difficult. An example is when the Telangana government used T-chits which uses similar blockchain technology for managing chit funds in India.
One major challenge for the government is to create trust among the populace in this type of voting by giving focus on user inclusion. Another challenge is to create a need for this technology and making sure that deficiencies can be addressed using blockchain and remote voting. Recently a webinar ‘Exploring Blockchain for remote voting’ was organized by the Election commission of India and Tamil Nadu e-governance agency to spread the importance and merits and demerits of this new system. Many others related to the technology like Election Commission of India, Union Ministry of Electronics and IT and various other bodies also joined in this webinar.
