New Delhi [India], June 3 : The Election Commission of India (ECI) on Tuesday announced to introduce a new technology-driven system to provide more timely and accurate updates on voter turnout trends.
The initiative, called the Voter Turnout Ratio (VTR), will be integrated into the ECINET app and allow Presiding Officers (PROs) at each polling station to enter voter turnout data directly every two hours on polling day.
"Under this new initiative, the Presiding Officer (PRO) of each polling station, will now be directly entering voter turnout on the new ECINET App every two hours on polling day in order to reduce the time lag in the updation of the approximate polling trends. This will be automatically aggregated at the constituency level. The approximate voting percentage trends will continue to be published every two hours as before," the ECI said in a statement.
According to ECI, the new VTR sharing process reduces the time lag associated with earlier manual reporting methods. However, the legal requirement to detail the account of votes recorded by the polling agents remains unchanged.
"Under the statutory framework of Rule 49S of the Conduct of Elections Rules, 1961, Presiding Officers (PROs) are required to furnish Form 17C, detailing the account of votes recorded, to polling agents, who are nominated by the candidates and are present at the polling station at the close of poll. While this legal requirement remains unchanged, the process of updating the VTR App, which had evolved as a facilitative, non-statutory mechanism to keep the public informed of the approximate voter turnout percentage trends is being streamlined to ensure faster updation," the ECI said.
The PROs will enter the voter turnout data into the ECINET app after the closing of poll, which would reduce the delays and ensure that approximate percentage of votes polled would be available on the updated VTR app constituency-wise.
"Where mobile networks are unavailable, entries can be made offline and synced once connectivity is restored. This updated VTR App will become an integral part of ECINET before the Bihar elections," it said.
Earlier, sector officers collected voter turnout data manually and passed it on to Returning Officers (ROs) via phone calls, SMS, or messaging apps.
"This information was aggregated every two hours and uploaded to the Voter Turnout (VTR) App. The polling percentage trends were often updated hours later, based on physical records arriving late in the night or even the next day, leading to delays of 4-5-hours or more leading to misperceptions by some," it added.