EC's watchful eyes transcend 600-km distance

As a large turnout kept polling officials busy in the Sankarankoil Assembly constituency, nearly 600 km away, the proceedings were closely monitored by the Election Commission on Sunday. As many as 240 polling stations out of the 242 were within the watchful eye. Click here for flowchart BSNL covered 133 polling stations with wired broadband technology, and 107 stations with WiMax, a fourth generation communication technology for delivering high-speed wireless internet service to large geographical areas. According to technical personnel of the Election Commission, Sankarankoil constituency, with 2.06 lakh voters on the rolls, had only a few “shadow regions” as far as broadband connectivity was concerned. Technical personnel at the monitoring cell in Chennai on Sunday asked presiding officers in all the polling stations to focus on the voting compartment and presiding officer. Any incident in a polling station could be monitored by the technical personnel in Chennai and the district headquarters, with a time delay in video streaming of just a few seconds. When many parts of the country are still struggling to cope with connectivity challenges during online monitoring of elections, Sankarankoil had only two polling stations in offline mode monitoring. Use of technology for monitoring of elections has been consistently gathering momentum in the State despite a number of challenges. Network problems, server issues and machine snags are gradually being tackled by a strong team of technical personnel in the State. Source code is being readied to support election monitoring even with minimum bandwidth. In the Assembly Elections last year, over 15,000 of the 54,314 polling stations in the State had online monitoring of the elections. In addition to the online monitoring of elections, an SMS-based poll management system has commissioned by the Election Commission. A total of 13 types of SMS reports were sent by the presiding officers directly to the technical team to keep them updated. Every event including arrival of polling material to the station, mock poll, presence of micro observers, start of poll, interruption and resumption of polling, and the number of people still in the queue after 5 p.m. were monitored by the technical team.