• The Election Commission of India has operationalised the new digital platform ECINET in the recently concluded bypolls in the five Assembly constituencies in Kerala, Gujarat, Punjab and West-Bengal on June 19. The results were declared on June 23.

• ECINET is a new one-stop platform, integrating over 40 of EC’s existing mobile and web applications.

• The bypolls witnessed the successful implementation of some of the modules of ECINET, which will become fully operational in the coming weeks.

Uploading of VTR

• A major achievement during the bypolls was uploading of the VTR (voter turnout) trends directly by presiding officers on ECINET as against the earlier manual process. 

• This enabled quick sharing of information, increased transparency and a significant reduction in time lag in publishing VTR trends. 

• Through ECINET, it was ensured that presiding officers uploaded the final VTR figures before leaving their respective polling stations which resulted in much faster availability of VTR trends on ECINET for the public. 

• The streamlined, technology-driven system was able to provide timely updates on the approximate voter turnout percentage trends during the bypolls.

Faster publication of Index Cards

• Another major outcome of the introduction of ECINET has been the faster publication of Index Cards, which were made available within 72 hours of the declaration of the poll results. 

• The Index Card, is a non-statutory, post-election statistical reporting format, developed during the late 1980s, as a suo-moto initiative by the Election Commission to promote accessibility of election-related data at the constituency level for all stakeholders, including researchers, academia, policymakers, journalists, and general public.

• Under the new system, most data fields in the Index Card are auto-filled using ECINET inputs. Before the introduction of ECINET, the publication of Index Cards used to take several days, weeks, or even months as the data was filled and verified manually by the officials.

• The reports contain data across multiple dimensions such as candidates, electors, votes polled, votes counted, party-wise and candidate-wise vote share, gender-based voting patterns, regional variations, and performance of political parties.

Manorama Yearbook app is now available on Google Play Store and iOS App Store