Karnataka to announce real-time poll results

BANGALORE, INDIA: Talk of elections in India, violation of the the Model Code of Conduct takes precedence. To curb such practices and enable smooth conduct of polls, several states in India, for the first time, put in place a very tech-intensive process during the 15th Lok Sabha elections.

However, Karnataka, the IT hub of India, takes credit to be the only state in the country to have leveraged the benefits of IT to the fullest in conducting fair and free elections by minimizing the violations to a great extent.

In addition, the Election Commission of Karnataka, for the first time, will also announce the poll results in the state real time on May 16, thus enabling the entire process to be technology-intensive.

Speaking to CIOL, Chief Electoral Officer of Karnataka, M. N. Vidyashankar said, “We have made all arrangements to announce the poll results real time. A separate URL has been created to announce the results, which will be updated and refreshed every 30 seconds starting from 8 am on May 16, the day of counting of votes.”

Explaining further, he said, “The website will offer round-wise information on who is leading, who is trailing, what is the margin, and, most importantly, what is the percentage of votes counted and at what time was it completed.”

This time, the counting process will be almost error-free, he added.

“Even if the site gets 200,000 hits at one go, it should not crash. The process is being tested to check for accuracy.”

Vidyashankar said, perhaps Karnataka will be the only state in India which is going to give real-time counting results to the general public.

“As soon as the returning officer completes the counting and announces the result, the same will be visible for the public to view from any corner of the world.”

He added that the data entries are done in three levels - one at the EVM level ie., at the polling station level , one at the round level and one at the macro level. “Each one of these entries has to coincide and tally. Hence the possibility of errors are almost reduced to zero,” he says.

Deployment of hardware

Every parliamentary constituency will have 28 to 29 systems backed with two servers – one main server and one backup server, all of which are networked through LAN. The first level of connectivity is provided through BSNL and the redundancy through Reliance or Airtel. Even the redundancy will be on high-speed connectivity, Vidyashankar said.

Technology-intensive process

The entire election process was made very technology-intensive in two ways, says Vidyashankar. “Firstly, we developed a web monitoring system (WMS), an umbrella where all he systems are integrated. From day one, this had been an IT-driven election. All our instructions would go on emails.”

“As everything was Web-enabled, WMS gave us minute-to-minute information on violations of the Model Code of Conduct – including how many violations were taking place, what was the extent of the violation, what was the financial value of the violation, has the case been booked, if booked against which candidate and which political party. All these information was monitored to the last minute.”

Secondly, the office of the CEO was made more tech-intensive and the office saw to it that the culture spread to the SP’s office and the DC’s office in all districts in the State.

“They had to do the data entry on the Web module. We never entertained hard copies or exchange of information through any other medium. All these offices use very less paper,” he added.

“During this election, we saw 1,950 violations of Model Code of Conduct in the state. Through WMS we were able to monitor the nature of violations in great detail like did they involve goods, liquor or cash. Similarly, we tracked information of the value of the goods seized, when, and what time of the day was it seized. At one level, we also tracked which party was indulging in more violations,” Vidyashankar explained.

“We knew that a couple of constituencies were more sensitive in the State. For the first time, we introduced GPS-enabled system to monitor and track the most sensitive polling stations in the State and track where the official posted on duty at any given time. This system was enabled through a BSNL SIM card, which was given to each official on duty.”

The WMS was deployed in all the states and union territories in the country.

“After we developed it in Karnataka, the Central Election Commission asked us to develop it for CEOs of all states in India. We have not monitored as to how many made use of it. Karnataka was very serious about this and hence the violations had been very minimal here,” he notes.

“During the last Assembly elections, the value of violations stood at Rs 45 crore in Karnataka. This time it came down to Rs 28 crore and we also saw that compliance to law was much better,” Vidyashankar said. “Further, Karnataka is the only state in the country which did not go for repolls, which I attribute to the use of IT,” he adds.

Use of IT has also substantially reduced manual intervention in the entire election is process. Also the number of officials deployed for the counting purpose, has also been reduced to 68,000 from over one lakh.

The deployment of WMS was done through state level agency, CMC, an end-to-end IT solutions provider.