I want to vote through my mobile

It is a shame that even in this age of technology one must present himself at a particular location for casting his vote.  There are many who have to forgo their right to vote because they cannot do so.  These include our defense personnel and also those who man the polling booths.  The provision of postal ballot mostly remains on paper as a clause in some rule.  Then there are a large number of Indians who are in transferable jobs, posted at far away places, and have not taken the pains of having themselves enrolled in the local voters' list.  They would like to choose from candidates in their domicile only.  In fact it is this reason and not any excessive lethargy that keeps large number of middle class people from voting.

And yet the solution is pretty simple.  When capturing data for voter-id and voters' list capture a single piece of additional data - voter's mobile number.  If so desired a cross check can be made with the service provider to make sure that it is in the name of the voter only.  And now let the poor chap vote for his favorite candidate just as they do for participants in reality shows.  He could be anywhere in the world and yet exercise his franchise.

An objection that could be raised is that of secrecy.  It should be easy to handle this too through technology.  Let the servers receiving the data be programmed to separate out the vote from the mobile number soon after receipt. The vote is to be used for counting while the mobile number list is to be used to eliminate voting more than once.

I am confident that technology can be put in place to take care of surge in data traffic on the election day.  And once this is done we may be seeing a voter turnout close to cent percent.

Also think of the savings that can be made on setting up booth and arranging security.  And the term booth capturing will be lost to future generations.  For you cannot capture something that doesn't exist!

A Mobile Population and Need for Internet Constituencies

All our governance systems are based on the idea of people being rooted to a place.  So address is an integral part of all documents issued by the government and bulk of government services have to be availed only at the place of domicile.  The most fundamental right of voting is also restricted to choosing from candidates from the constituency where your residence is located and can only be exercised at a designated polling booth near your residence.

This concept of rooted people may have been a workable idea in the yesteryears when most people were employed in agriculture or small businesses at their native place.  Today a large section of society has become mobile.  They relocate frequently in search of better prospects and it is a marathon task to obtain new documents from a government machinery that doesn't think in terms of customer service but only in terms of dispensing favors.

This mobility got a kind of formal recognition from the government when TRAI talked of MNP across circles.  So your mobile number remains unchanged even if you move to another state within the country.  RBI also acknowledged this when it mooted the idea of account number portability across banks and branches.

This increased mobility coupled with the difficulty of getting oneself registered with various government agencies at the new place, including those maintaining the electoral rolls, is a great impediment to democracy.  Many in the working class are not able to cast their vote precisely for this reason.  And then instead of blaming our systems we put the blame squarely on the working class.  The suits the political parties too because they can then afford to ignore the aspiration of this class.

Technology provides an easy solution to this.  Let there be Pan-India Internet Constituencies somewhat like the graduate constituency.  The number of such constituencies may be decided on the basis of number of people willing to register for it and vote through internet.  These people may identify themselves biometrically using their Aadhaar registration and cast their vote online.  An alternate way could be to vote through their registered e-mail id.  The e-mails may be processed by a software program which ensures secrecy.

If this suggestion is implemented a large number of working people who are currently not able to cast their vote will be able to and happy to do so.  This will make the democracy a true and inclusive democracy.