A team of first-year students at the Indian Institute of Technology (Indian School of Mines), Dhanbad is all set to develop an e-voting system, based on Blockchain technology, that would be free from ballot papers and Electronic Voting Machines (EVM). "The advantage of Blockchain technology-based voting systems includes the ability to vote from any place and prevent tampering of votes and assure voter anonymity and end-to-end verification and distributed ledger records," said Aditya Joshi, one of the team members while speaking to TNIE. The other includes Mohit Gupta, Digvijay Anand and is led by Ravneet Singh.
People under this system would be able to cast their votes using their fingerprints with the help of laptops at the polling booths. Besides being cost-effective, the e-voting system will also be flawless and tamper-proof, they claim. "We have prepared a project called the e-voting system which cannot be changed or tampered with, and if someone tries to tamper with it, the entire system will become corrupt. It has an additional security feature that would require the fingerprint of the person to cast their vote, which is linked with their Aadhaar card," said team leader Ravneet.
According to Singh, since no ballot paper or EVM is used in this system, it will be cost-effective and involve very few people as compared to the conventional system of voting. Mohit, however, said that the project is still at the development stage and is likely to be completed within 2-3 months. "Even small elections at college and club level elections can be conducted through this e-voting system, which would be flawless and on which people could depend upon. The election results could also be obtained instantly which would also be quite reliable," said Mohit.
There will be no scope for questioning the voting system by the parties losing the elections, the team claims. Aditya said that even those who are developing this system cannot manipulate the votes. "We presented the idea of the e-voting system during HACKFEST-22 organised at IIT-ISM. There are several advantages that make Blockchain technology very efficient to deal with the threat of utilising a voting token more than once and the attempt to influence the transparency of the result," he added.
