Bhopal, Sep 11 (IANS) The Madhya Pradesh Election Commission has taken an important step towards making the voting process paperless.
The commission has started a pilot project of paperless voting process for the post of Sarpanch in Gram Panchayat Ratua Ratanpur of Berasia Vikas Khand of Bhopal district. This is the first time in the country that the voting process is being made paperless.
This process has been started under the leadership of State Election Commissioner Basant Pratap Singh. Secretary State Election Commission Abhishek Singh has said that the objective of the paperless process is to make the voting process simple, easy and transparent. To realize the concept of this paperless booth, work is being done at both hardware and software levels, so that in future this system can be implemented at polling centers across the state.
Abhishek Singh, Secretary of the State Election Commission, said that the paperless booth scheme has been made with the objective of conducting a simple, easy and transparent voting process in panchayats and urban bodies. In panchayat elections, 26 forms are filled for completing all the processes and reporting at the polling booth. Even a small mistake in these leads to many disputes. Along with this, court cases are also filed. On making paperless booths, these forms are being digitized. Its first experiment was done in Ratua Ratanpur, which was completely successful.
He further said that paperless voting is already happening, because you use EVMs, but all the processes happening apart from EVMs have been manual, like filling forms and other things. We tried to make that entire process paperless and this experiment has been successful. We have identified the voter electronically. We have captured the voting percentage in real time.
He further said that in future we will try to make the entire process of the upcoming elections online on the system. We will try to generate all the reports. This can be beneficial in the future. This will save human resources, increase accuracy, increase transparency and increase trust in the system.
In this process, signatures and thumb impressions of voters were made electronic for their identification and record of their voting. Voting percentage and ballot paper accounting is being done online. Voting percentage is being received online on all platforms every 2 hours. After the end of voting, the ballot paper accounting will also be given to the candidates and polling agents on their email ID.
–IANS
PSK/ABM
