TOI of 21 March had an article on issues with online registration titled "Online registration is a dismal failure" by +Manu Aiyappa . Towards the end a quote was attributed to some electoral officer.
"The system alone is not to blame say electoral officers. People especially from the IT sector show a lackadaisical attitude towards the democratic process and are not taking advantage of online registration"
As a volunteer for some of the voter registration drives, I have interacted with and updated officials in the CEO's office on various issues faced by end users of their website. So I find it difficult to believe that a responsible person from the CEO's office will blame the victims (applicants for voter registration) for a bad product developed by his software vendor.
I will present few data points for the consideration of your readers.
1. People from IT sector have been spending their weekends helping non IT people with online registration. I invite your team to visit the next voter registration camp listed on the smartvote.in website and interact with the volunteers and the people who come there to register.
2. In one of the camps which I attended, a significant number of people in the queue were IT literate who could have filled up the forms in the comfort of their office/home. They stood in line for hours because; even after repeated attempts the server did not accept their applications. So they finally decided to take the assistance of volunteers to fillup the forms. One such person in the queue claimed to be the person responsible for developing one of the most visited travel related portal owned by a Govt of India Enterprise. If even he could not figure out why the system was rejecting his application, then figuring out the issue with online forms would be a truly herculean task for a common citizen.
3. In corporates, Smartvote volunteers conduct awareness campaign and train the champions for voter registration, This is followed by a series of mails that go out to the employees announcing the start of campaign, process of application and location of dropboxes for the completed applications.
These steps have resulted in hundreds of enrollments from each corporate entities. In some cases the number of registered voters has increased from ~50% to 90+%
Such significant increase in voter registration shows that the problem today is not voter apathy.
Simplification of process, responsive officials and a proper awareness campaign is the need of the day.
4. Volunteers are signing up on a daily basis to conduct a drive in their office/college/layout( http://www.smartvote.in/
Citizens across Bangalore are regularly requesting for a drive in their area ( http://www.smartvote.in/
Citizens outside Bangalore are asking for replication of the smartvote model in their cities and states (http://www.smartvote.in/
On weekends volunteers are traveling across the city to help setup and run the voter registration drive.
People, especially from the IT sector, have shown very positive attitude toward democratic process and are taking advantage of online registration. Most of the volunteers driving the online registration are software professionals, spending their weekends and spare time for the cause. I think it would be a disservice to the IT sector to accuse them of "lackadaisical attitude towards the democratic process"
CEO's and Citizens of Karnataka have been letdown by a software vendor who provided them with a solution(The main subject of Manu's article) which is
• Poorly designed and architected.
• Having very basic flaws even months after its deployment for the general public.
• Based on a platform which is known to have issues in handling heavy traffic and avoided by 80+% of the websites which get heavy traffic
• Still showing serious downtime and other issues on an almost weekly basis.
CEO Karnataka by engaging with citizen groups in Bangalore has initiated a new step in democracy. This needs to be appreciated, nurtured and scaled across the state and nation.
It is unfortunate that some members of the CEO's team reflexively pass adverse comments without knowing the ground reality.
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