Krishnanagar: The Election Commission has developed a new app, ECINET, that presiding officers will use to provide all vote-related information online.
This new step of the Election Commission is to modernise the entire election process and make it more transparent.
The Kaliganj Vidhan Sabha by-election in Nadia district of West Bengal has been identified to run the trial of the app. Subsequently, it will be used in the Assembly elections of all other states.
To date, the presiding officers use to send information via SMSes to the Commission from the polling centre about updates on the election day.
This info included mock polls, votes polled, as well as the current conditions of the polling centre.
However, several discrepancies were creeping up in this procedure. The whole process was also very slow.
The Election Commission feels that with the app, the information sharing will be faster, reliable and technology-centric. Besides, it will digitise all supervisory and reporting work related to the election.
The concerned Presiding Officer has to first register via OTP in the ECINET app.
On election day, he/she has to upload when mock polls started, how many polling agents are there, whether VVPAT results are tallying in the mock polls and whether the mock polls data is later deleted.
Then every two hours, the officer had to inform on the app how many males, females and transgenders are coming to vote.
Once the voting is over, information about votes polled in the EVMs, as well as updates on the law and order situation, has to be uploaded.
As all this info is uploaded on the app, it can be seen by the Returning Officer, District Election Officer, as well as officials of the Election Commission.
Earlier, as this info was passed via SMS, there was no provision for all stakeholders to verify it. This procedure will now enhance transparency as there will be a provision to view the past data too.
For the Kaliganj trial, the Election Commission officials are training 390 Presiding officers in a camp in Krishnanagar.
