A Vision for Digital Elections in India: Linking Aadhaar, Voter ID and Biometric Authentication
Can Technology Make Elections More Secure, Faster and Less Dependent on Manpower? India conducts one of the world's largest democratic exercises. Millions of citizens participate in elections, while enormous human resources, logistics, security arrangements and public expenditure are required to conduct polling across the country. As India moves rapidly toward digital governance, it is worth asking an important question: Can we make the election process more digital, more efficient and more secure while protecting the secrecy and freedom of every citizen's vote? One possible approach is to create a secure digital connection between the Aadhaar identity system and the Electoral Photo Identity Card (EPIC/Voter ID), combined with carefully designed biometric authentication at the time of voting. This is not a proposal to replace democracy with technology. Rather, it is an idea to use technology to strengthen the democratic process 1. Linking Aadhaar with Voter ID At present, the...