The election officials had a tough day yesterday when Mumbaikars ventured out to vote in larger numbers. It was not just checking names in voters’ list, election officials also had another task in hand, that was to solve math problems.
According to the Indian Express, at the information desk outside a municipal school at Mahul in Chembur, officials were thronged by voters seeking to know whether their names were on the electoral list or their booth numbers. With many struggling to find their names among the six booths and the voluminous pages to sift through, an official began looking up voter names on the chief electoral officer’s official website.
But there was a catch, each time a new name had to search, website’s search engine required a math equation to be solved, this was to ensure that the computer is able to determine that the user is a human and not an automated bot. The polling officer named Shekhar Kamble, a BMC employee did the additional work of solving the math sums to help voters find their names quickly. Kamble told the leading daily, “Earlier, the website required alphabets to be filled. It was changed to maths sums a year ago, which makes it slightly more tedious to access information quickly.”