Municipal Corporation of Delhi mulls over online voting experiment

NEW DELHI: In the run-up to the 2017 municipal elections, an online voting exercise is on the cards. Municipal secretary Rajesh Mehta has said that officials have been chalking out the plan for two years now.

"By the end of this year we will have an exercise in which we will set up 15 polling stations across all the three corporations. We will have fictitious candidates and 12,000 voters will be able to vote from laptops, mobiles or iPads instead of EVMs. The data will be stored on a cloud or a common remote server instead of the conventional memory card in the EVMs," Mehta said.

Verification and ensuring non duplicity of data is one of their top priorities. "There will be a one-time password which will be linked to the Aadhaar card. We are pondering over all possible ways to ensure secrecy of ballot and ways to prevent electoral malpractices," he said.

Online voting will save a lot of cost and expenditure incurred on manning polling booths, he said.