Integrated Election Voting System: A Model for Leveraging ICT in the Indian Election Scenario

In India, Information and Communication technologies (ICT) are being increasingly deployed in almost each sector of economy including agriculture, health, transportation, and education. But when we analyze the Indian Election Voting Scenario, it is realized that the ICT has not been exploited to its fullest extent. Recently, the Election Commission of India (ECI) has introduced few ICT-enabled initiatives, but the application of advanced ICT technologies needs to be promoted in Indian Election Voting System. In this paper, we propose E-Voting System to provide for an additional channel of voting to the Indian electorate. Further, this paper proposes the deployment model \"Integrated Election Voting System\" that leverages ICT technologies to integrate the existing Electronic Voting Machine (EVM) System with the proposed E-Voting System to provide a solution to the problem of low voting percentages among the Indian electorate. In addition, this paper includes results of simulations carried out to evaluate the E-Voting System. Also, the paper elaborates on the components of the proposed model, besides discussing the challenges faced by E-Voting Systems and the advantages offered by the proposed model.