Mumbai: Youngsters old enough to vote would rather cast their vote on their smartphones, instead of lining up at a poll booth to exercise their franchise. It would be so much easier if we could just vote with a click sitting at home, they say. Students claim the government is pushing for ‘Digital India’, conducting online transactions and using digital media for all purposes.
Siddhanth Mehta, a student, said, “If everything is shifting online, then why not elections too? The whole Digital India campaign has been enforced upon us by the government by changing our payment modes, bank transactions, document submissions and even applications for educational courses — everything is online.”
Social media plays an important role for electoral campaigns, according to the youth. Tania Chakraborty says, “Twitter is agog with electoral discussions and political parties are using social media platforms for their propaganda.
If campaigns can conducted online, then we might as well vote online too. We spend more time on the internet and we all have smartphones, so it is easier to research about political leaders and their work.”
Online voting will eliminate errors or acts of cheating witnessed on electronic voting machines (EVMs), claim young professionals. Ritika Singhania, a web developer, made out a case of this. “We often hear cases of discrepancies or cheating in EVMs where votes are all cast for a single political party. Also, first-time voters often struggle to find their names on the voters’ list.
These errors can be eliminated in online voting through a protected system using advanced technology. Once the voter’s name is on the list, only then will the online voter get an activation link. Once you have voted, you cannot vote again, as you can only log in once,” she explained.
Students who are appearing for examinations said they do not have the time to wait in long queues at polling booths. Iqbal Ansari said, “We do not want to waste our time in these long queues in this hot weather. We understand elections are important but the voting process can be made user-friendly. Why should we stick to a tedious offline electoral process while otherwise we rely willingly on online systems for all our other activities?”
