Telangana keen to experiment with blockchain tech for remote voting
The state has expressed interest in tinkering with blockchain technology for enabling remote voting in the united states. Blockchain solutions could possibly be experimented with on a small scale for learning purposes and scaled up, Principal Secretary of Information Technology Jayesh Ranjan said on Monday.
Ranjan was speaking at a webinar, ‘Exploring Blockchain for Remote Voting’, organised by the Election Commission of India and Tamil Nadu E-Governance Agency (TNEGA). The Election Commission of India (ECI), Union ministry of electronics and IT (MeITy), MyGov and industry bodies working in the blockchain space had joined the webinar.
They deliberated over the possible deployment of blockchain - a decentralised digital ledger-based technology - for remote voting. It would, in theory,
Ranjan said state governments could pool their efforts, with a go-ahead from the ECI, to master the technology required for this endeavour, including facial recognition software and encryption tools.
The senior bureaucrat suggested that the state might use its “authority, position and influence” to convince small bodies - societies, neighbourhoods, sports associations, cultural associations etc - to use blockchain-based technologies to conduct their internal elections. “Once we have sufficient use cases, we can convince the federal government to give it a try and steadily scale it up to the national level,” he said.
He admitted that, as of now, there is no demand or deficiency addressed by the application of remote voting and blockchain. “There must be a need for this specific technology. One needs to demonstrate that particular deficiencies can be addressed using blockchain and remote voting,” he said. He added that the “tech is not difficult,” citing exemplory case of the Telangana state government’s T-Chits, which uses blockchain technology for managing chit funds in the state.
TNEGA CEO and Commissioner of e-Governance Santosh K Misra agreed that remote voting should be started in a tiny way, and developed gradually. He noted that there is a have to build trust among the general populace in potential remote voting systems by concentrating on user inclusion.
