Electronic electoral mandate: advantages and complexities

Electronic mandate has become the accepted national voting process in India. This is considered as a step way forward to the ballot paper vote franchising which was prevalent in the country from many decades. It has completely replaced the later in national as well as provincial elections. The remnants of ballot box voting remain only in small municipal and rural civic body elections known as panchayats in India. The electronic mandate has obvious advantages. They are fast, accurate, economical, convenient, transparent and voter friendly. These are the claimed benefits. However there are claims on the otherwise too. The opponents to this voting process claim that this methodology is rather tricky, mischievous and has fraudulent implications. The debate has occasionally been heated on the national level and in spite of being the exclusively applied process in national elections, the baiters to this technique are far from being satisfied. We will try to cover the benefits, disadvantages as much as possible in this write up and also focus on the points which are not disclosed in public domain and try to work out the truth behind the scientific pedestal to this technique friendly, handy and fabulous methodology and also work out the answers to the involved complexities lying therein. The discussion is intended to be based only on the scientific point of view and the various breakthroughs in technological fronts that has happened on the global scene in recent years.