Thoughts on how technology can help encourage voting by all

I was wondering what makes the educated people not to vote. Though they are the first to follow the current affairs and comment on whats happening through the media there is something that makes them not to vote in elections. He gets first hand information from the media and has the oppurtunity to analyse things in the right perspective. Thinking about this issue one can see that there is a distinct gap between the information that an educated person gets from the media and an average Indian villager gets the information from the media.

The way Indian media is heading sounds both encouraging and and alarming. The opening up of Indian market led to the mushrooming of private TV channels and of late many news channels. In their competition to make a difference each news channel is doing some sort of investigative journalism, exposing the corrupt politicians and law breakers. The recent exposure of bribe acceptance by MP's for raising issues in parliament, Media pressures on the failure of judicial system in convicting the culprits on the Jessica Lal case verdict etc.,. are examples of the positives that the media is bringing in India. At the same time most of the print and visual media are owned by people favoring some political party and the political views exposed by these channels and newspapers are biased.

For an average Indian who doesnt follow the different news channels and their investigative journalisms all he gets is the biased reports from papers and the prime time news telecast in the channels owned by people favoring some political party. Its these people who really vote. The educated Indian who follows the current affairs and analyses things in the right perspective almost never votes. All he does is express his views like me in blogs like this and give reader feedbacks in news website forums.

The election commision should take some major steps in encouraging the educated to vote. The present day educated, executives, are mostly the floating population. Most of the time they dont stay at the same city even for the period of a government. They will have their name in the voter's list at one location but will be residing at another location at the time of voting. Introducing a social security number kind of scheme in India and giving an identification smart card for every-citizen of India will solve this problem. Whenever the citizen migrates to a city he can go to a goverment installed kiosk and swipe his card and update his present details. At the time of voting all he needs to do is just swipe the card as a mark of identification and vote. Public kiosks can also be installed in cities for voting, instead of having to vote in polling booths. This removes the necessity to put the indelible ink mark on index finger and tracking of voters list in a polling booth. However India being a vast country with 80% of it being remote villages there is significant problem of feasibility in achieving this. As an initial step this scheme can be introduced in cities alone, where most of the migrating population live and step by step this can be introduced in the villages.

The I.T industry can think of coming up with products for these kind of requiements which will help India in the longer run. The government needs to fund for these kind of research and product development. Hopefully some educated bloke in the parliament / election commission hears this.