I go to my polling station during the Election Day, tell my name and address to the polling agent, he verifies that with the voter list. Then I cast my vote. I exercise my fundamental right of a citizen, done. What are all these fuzz about it? Ok I get it. Somebody intentionally compromise the voter list and now it does not have my name and address; however it has the names of “Tom, Dick and Harry” in a factious address and “Dobir, Sabir and kabir” in my address. Somebody in my polling station cast those votes for a specific candidate. Aa-ha, this is election engineering. I am screwed; I don’t get to exercise my fundamental rights.
Hmm, we need to fix this; but should it take 18 months to do a voter registration with photo ID and execute election? 18 months is a long time, 550 days. If I were to employ 1000 registrar with a digital camera and a laptop to shoot a digital photo and collect their name and address then lets say each of the registrar collects 50 of the voter details in the list, then end of the day I have 50,000 enlisted. Suppose there are 94 million qualified voters, (according to sept 1, 2006; http://www.ecs.gov.bd/aboutbec.php3) then it would take 1880 days; ops that is 63 months. I got my math wrong, which is way too long; let me redo the math, I would hire 10,000 registrars to do the job. This will take 6 months 10 days. Then use next couple of months to test the system, do a mock practice, publish the entire voter list and set the date for election.
However the task of compiling a voter list with photo ID is not as simple as it sounds. In Bangladesh, we have diverse population and cultural sensitivity that we have to acknowledge. Let us take an example of shooting a digital camera to capture the photo for the voter ID. Female voter may cover their hair or may wear a lot of makeup. These changes may confuse the polling agent during the day of election. Similarly for male voter, long hair, beard, long beard, various types of beard may as well confuse identification.
As far as I know, there are 96980 voter areas in 4500 Union of 83 district election offices. Based on this number, assume that we have the same number of agents to collect the voter information and to enlist the voter. Suppose, in the morning they start door to door. They came to my home. We are three brothers, three sisters and our parents. We all live in the same house and are at home during the time agent came. Agent captures a photo for each of us. Then he downloads the photographs to his laptop. He enters the address of our house. Next he brings up my photo; the address automatically comes up and he then asks my name, date of birth etc. Everything about me listed (hashed in database terms) against my photo. The agent then enters my brother’s details into his laptop and so on. The agent saves all the information in his laptop. End of the day he uploads all the data in a server; which is accessible from his office.
I just portrayed above a simplified version of voter registration. Let us add one little complexity which I mention in my second paragraph about condition of photograph; long hair, beard, makeup, hair cover etc may challenge visual identification verification process. Let us assume that the laptop, agent is using can capture finger prints. When the agent brings up my photo, he asked me to roll my thumb or the middle finger to the finger print capturing device or biometric device. This process enters one more identification entry to my hashed data. During the Election Day, I go to the polling station to cast my vote. I roll my finger to the same biometric device of the laptop; it brings up my photo, address, date of birth from the database. The attending Polling officer looks at my photo and asks my address for further verification. What happens here is that I sweep my finger to search the database for my photo along with all my information. However, this database can be mirrored and accessed directly from the server instantaneously or for simplicity, may be downloaded to the attending polling officers’ laptop.
Embracing technology to digitize Voter registration and Identity verification during the election at the polling station is a very simple process. All you have to do is two things, (1) Enlisting every voter during voter registration as explained; (2) Error proof identification verification of every voter at the polling station during the Election Day. I know the consultants hired by the election commission have not started their office yet, they have not had a meeting to understand the requirements of the election commission. Once they understand the requirements of EC, I have full confidence at least one consultant that I know of that they will provide us a comprehensive specification of the entire infrastructure. However, based on what I just sketched above, what are the specifications of the computing infrastructure that we need?
1. A human interface, capable of capturing finger prints, digital photo and relevant data (name, address, dob etc). A similar laptop like Intel World Ahead programs’ classmate PC with added feature like biometric identification device embedded with the keyboard and a built-in digital camera.
2. A set of mirror servers which could be LANed utilizing our fiber optic network where available; For places where LAN is not available, adoption of few Wi-max antennas can be use to complete the connectivity gaps.
3. A searchable database, which could be locally developed as I already mention the simplified specification.
That’s it we are done. I intentionally left out the national ID part. It is the responsibility of the constitution experts to come up with the specification of what they want to list under the national ID. It will be hard to avoid the temptation of becoming a Military (Police) state with all this information freely available at fingertips. However, in technical point of view, national ID can be easily done during the voter registration process. All the relevant information with the photo is available in the database, there by the agent may ask the citizen to collect a laminated national ID from the distribution center.
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