Online voter registration.

Today's TOI had an article on issues with online registration titled "Online registration is a dismal failure" by +manu aiyappa . towards the end a quote was attributed to some electoral officer.

"The system alone is not to blame say electoral officers. People especially from the IT sector show a lackadaisical attitude towards the democratic process and are not taking advantage of online registration"

As a volunteer for some of the voter registration drives I had the fortune to interact with and update officials in the CEO's office on various issues faced by end users of their website, So I find it difficult to believe that a responsible person from the CEO's office will blame the victims (applicants for voter registration) for a bad product developed by CMC.

I will present few data points for the consideration of your readers.

1. People from IT sector have been spending their weekends helping non IT people with online registration. I invite your team to visit the next voter registration camp listed on the smartvote.in website and interact with the volunteers and the people who have come there to register.
2. In one of the camp's which I attended a significant number of people in the queue were IT literate who could have filled up the forms in the comfort of their office/home. They stood in line for hours because, even after repeated attempts the server did not accept their application. So they finally decided to take the assistance of volunteers to fillup the forms. One such person in the queue claimed to be the person responsible for developing one of the most visited travel related portal owned by an Govt of India Enterprise. If even he could not figure out why the system was rejecting his application, Then figuring out the issue with online forms would be a truely herculean task for a common citizen.
3. Voter registration drive in Corporates basically consists of putting up a dropbox at some common location and sending an email to everyone about it. Just this one simple step has resulted in hundreds of application from each corporate entity where these drives were conducted. In some cases the number of registered voters in corporate houses increased from 50% to 90+% within days of launch of the voter registration drive. This is a simple scalable model which can be adopted by citizens across India.
4. Volunteers are signing up on a daily basis to conduct a drive in their office/college/layout( http://www.smartvote.in/content/volunteer-signup ) Citizens across Bangalore are regularly requesting for a drive in their area ( http://www.smartvote.in/content/request-drive-your-area )

In conclusion I would appreciate the CEO and his team who have taken a good step by starting the online registration process and allowing citizen volunteers to conduct voter registration and awareness drives. Regretfully he has been letdown by a software vendor who provided him with a solution which was

1. Poorly designed and architected.
2. Contained very basic flaws when it was deployed for the general public.
3. Based on a platform  which is known to have issues in handling heavy traffic and avoided by 80+% of the websites which get heavy traffic