The Telangana government has initiated a dry run of a smartphone-based eVoting solution that leverages technologies such as blockchain, facial recognition, and Aadhaar authentication to record one's vote. The project will be tested again in a mock vote which has been scheduled in Khammam district on October 20. The voting will be recorded on the TSEC-Vote App developed for Android smartphones now made available in English and Telugu. This development comes after the Telangana State Election Commission in 2020 announced that it was planning to use the e-Voting solution for the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) elections. However, the plan was shelved for the time being because officials realised that they had to bring in amendments to certain laws to take the plan further. [caption id="attachment_147322" align="aligncenter" width="516"] A screengrab of the TSEC eVote Android app which will record votes of Khammam citizens in a dummy election[/caption] India still does not have proper data protection or privacy legislation in place that regulates the usage of facial recognition. In addition to that, the Pegasus spyware attack drove home the message that smartphones, be it an iPhone or an Android, are not necessarily foolproof when it comes to thwarting cybersecurity vulnerabilities, and that there will always remain a chance of a device getting compromised. Keeping in mind that a vote is anonymised, how technologies that are being deployed for the e-Voting process cope with cybersecurity threats remains to be seen. What are the technologies to be used in the e-Voting app? The…
