Streamlining Voter Registration

Team Members:

1. Amal Desai
2. Asadali Hazariwala

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Idea

The core principle of a democracy is that all the citizens of a country have a voice in how it is governed. Given that elections need to be secure against acts of malicious intent, the voting process is extremely complicated. One essential part of this process is voter registration.

Background: Voter registration

It has been observed that adding voter registration to the voting process drastically reduces the turnout of an election in rural areas, where information about registration and registration processes does not easily reach. This means that even though they are technically eligible to vote, they are unable to do so. A means of creating an electoral roll without the direct intervention of the voters themselves would help to secure the election process while still maintaining a high voter turnout and not disenfranchising legitimate voters.

In India, the electoral roll is maintained and manually updated every 5 years.

Our Plan:

We plan to alter the registration process such that changes to the electoral roll are applied automatically whenever a citizen takes an action that declares them eligible. Since a government can not mandate that a citizen have any particular form of identification, these actions shall be as such:

1. If and when a citizen applies for any form of government ID such as Aadhar, Driving License, PAN card, etc, and is over the age of 18
2. If a citizen already possesses valid government ID, and turns 18
3. A citizen turns up at a voting station with valid proof of citizenship

The first two of the above will trigger automatic registration of the citizen onto the electoral roll. The third action will trigger what is known as same day registration.

Adding of citizens to electoral roll will be done without any thrid party intervention which will make it robust and secure. The data linked to that particular citizen will be added to the blockchain corresponding to the data present in the proof of citizenship used for adding the citizen to the electoral roll.

A blockchain can be used to maintain a secure and transparent electoral roll. The proposed solution is a consortium blockchain, for which the consensus participants will be various departments of the government that can trigger registration, such as the UIDAI for Aadhar cards, or RTOs for licenses. Therefore whenever one of these agencies detects that a citizen has turned 18, it will trigger the citizen's registration on the electoral roll. Each voting station can also be made a node in the permissioned blockchain to enable the system of Same Day Registration.

The end goal is to reduce the hoops a citizen has to go through to vote while still maintaining an electoral roll, and a blockchain is the perfect way to accomplish this goal efficiently, securely, and in a transparent fashion.

Contact details:

1. Amal Desai : [email protected]
2. Asadali Hazariwala : [email protected]