CIEVS: A cloud-based framework to modernize the Indian election voting system

In India, Information and Communication technologies (ICT) are being increasingly deployed in almost each sector of economy including media, health, agriculture, transportation, and education. Upon an analysis of the existing Indian Election Voting System, it is felt that the ICT remains to be exploited to its fullest potential. Although, the Election Commission of India (ECI) has recently taken up several ICT-enabled initiatives, but the application of advanced ICTs still needs to be promoted in Indian Election Voting System. In this paper, we propose an I-Voting System to provide for an additional channel of voting to the Indian electorate. This paper evaluates the utility of cloud computing technology in I-Voting and specifies ancillary benefits arising out of its deployment in I-Voting. Further, this paper proposes a cloud deployment model “Cloud-based Integrated Election Voting System (CIEVS)” that leverages advanced Information and Communication technologies including cloud computing, web services and mobile phone services to integrate the existing Electronic Voting Machine (EVM) System with the I-Voting System to provide a solution to the problem of prevailing low voting percentages in the Indian elections. Additionally, the paper elaborates on the components of the proposed model besides discussing the advantages offered by the proposed model.