This app will guide you to the nearest polling booth

Going all out to ensure maximum turn out of voters on May 12, the Election Commission has launched several initiatives. The latest to the list is a mobile app, Chunavana, that will guide voters to the nearest polling station besides updating them about candidates. The app—jointly developed by the Election Commission and Karnataka State Remote Sensing Application Centre (KSRSAC) is compatible with android smartphones and can be downloaded free of cost.

Following poor turn out of voters in the past elections, the Election Commission had commissioned a survey of Knowledge, Attitude and Practises (KAP) to ascertain actual reasons for the poor turn out of voters. According to Surya Sen, Joint Chief Electoral Officer about 25 of the voters did not know the address of their polling booths. “As many as 25 percent of the people neither knew about their polling stations nor they were updated about the candidates contesting polls. But this app will bridge that gap by guiding them to the exact polling station as per their EPIC ID,” he explained.

This apart, about 17.5 per cent people chose to skip voting because of the long queues. “Besides revealing the polling booth, the app also provides people with updates about the length of the queue. Based on that, they can go to the booth and cast their vote. All the 56,696 booths with their boundary have been mapped and fed into the app,” he explained. According to KSRSAC scientists who have designed the app in less than a month, the app also gives insight into previous elections held in Karnataka and how people have voted. The app will constantly be updated and will provide update during the counting of votes as well.