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Highlights
- A government body overseeing electoral processes in an Asian country wanted to strengthen the integrity of the electoral roll through automation.
- The election body collaborated with TCS and adopted a flagship web-based application that revolutionized electoral roll management.
- The application managed the end-to-end life cycle of electors. It is available nationwide to all citizens for enrolment, corrections, migration, and deletion to the electoral roll.
Challenge
Electoral rolls are the backbone of the election process.
Electoral rolls and integrity
They are comprehensive lists maintained with stringent guidelines to ensure accuracy and up-to-date information of electors. Electoral rolls serve as the official record that identifies and validates eligible electors, thereby safeguarding the electoral process against fraud and manipulation.
Preparing electoral rolls is a meticulous process that involves identifying eligible electors, collecting data, verifying and making necessary corrections, and continuously updating the roll—and this must be done for hundreds of thousands of citizens, spread across remote villages, dense urban centers, and everything in between.
The integrity of the electoral roll, therefore, cannot be overstated. It is the foundation upon which fair elections are built, ensuring every eligible citizen has equal opportunity to participate in the democratic process.
Before automation, electoral rolls were manually prepared, which was a time-consuming, labor-intensive process, prone to inaccuracies. Though governments started transitioning to electronic systems to address these issues, data inconsistencies and security concerns persisted.
A government body overseeing electoral processes in an Asian country wanted to strengthen the integrity of the electoral roll through automation. The agency recognized that managing electoral rolls for the staggering scale of the electorate required advanced technology and specially designed applications. This prompted the poll-conducting body to collaborate with TCS to automate the preparation and management of electoral rolls.
Solution
TCS developed a flagship web-based application that revolutionized electoral roll management in the Asian country.
Toward smarter elections
The application has a centralized database that serves as the single source of truth for the election body. This repository consolidates and maintains accurate and up-to-date electoral data, ensuring consistency and reliability across all electoral processes and activities.
A standout feature is the executive dashboard, which is updated daily and offers a 360-degree view of the elector life cycle.
The application is crucial for distributing electoral information quickly to citizens. It enables citizens to look up their names and polling station details beforehand. Electors can easily update and search their details across states using their EPIC number or personal information such as name, date of birth, or mobile number. In addition, the elector information slip is generated from the application and handed to the electors by booth-level officers, providing all the necessary details about the elector and their polling station and poll details like poll date and time.
Benefits
TCS addressed three key issues affecting the electoral process: security concerns, the challenge of decentralized data, and application performance.
A new era in electoral roll management
By providing a unified and comprehensive database, the application enhanced the integrity and transparency of the electoral system, facilitating informed decision-making and efficient management of electoral operations.
The results speak for themselves. The application has been successfully used for several elections in the country since its deployment and has clocked more than one billion searches for electoral details thus far.
The application has been used to print over 158 million elector IDs and nearly 1.3 billion elector information slips, which help electors know where and when to vote. Over 740 million electors have been verified through house-to-house surveys. It has also reduced the time to create electoral roll PDFs from two weeks to five days.
The numbers indicate how the application is making voting more accessible, more secure, and more inclusive for everyone.
The TCS advantage
As the primary technology partner, TCS helped the election body give a digital makeover to electoral roll management.
Efficient elections – the true mark of a democracy
The application that TCS developed went live phase-wise starting November 1, 2022, and within seven months, it was rolled out all over the country with complete functionalities and data migration. It allows over 1.05 million nationwide officials to handle elector registrations, updates, and deletions efficiently.
It is available across the country to all citizens for enrolment, corrections, migration, and deletion to the electoral roll. The application on the backend is available to the election body and electoral officers at every level.
The application has standardized forms processing and created a standard database schema and a template for e-roll printing. It has automated the electoral roll management process, starting from elector registration and field verification, and provided a decision support system for electoral registration officers, enabling extensive integrated value-added services.
As the authoritative source of electoral information, the application plays a crucial role in upholding the credibility of the electoral process in the country by keeping elector data safe from hackers and ensuring that only authorized people can use the system.
