Missing Voters India

Building democratic participation in India: Identifying and adding eligible voters who are missing from electoral rolls

One of the basic rights of a citizen in a democracy is the right to vote and elect their own representatives. As a core right under and identifier of citizenship, it confers the primary document for establishing one’s identity through the voter identity card. Despite being one of the largest democracies in the world, research has shown that a staggering 120 million voters are missing from India’s electoral rolls. In order to ensure that every eligible voter in India has an equitable right to participate in the democratic process and determine their collective future, the Missing Voter mobile application was launched. The Missing Voters app is underpinned by rigorous research and concurrent campaign with the aim of augmenting and strengthening institutional processes through innovative technological application. The app follows the methodology developed during the research process which includes identifying missing voters and adding them through the following 5 simple steps:

Missing Voter Household Identification: We datamine the Electoral rolls and identify the households that have unregistered voters.

Reach Out: Our team which includes both volunteers and contractual employees, either of them, reach the doorstep of the missing voters’ households with the Missing Voters mobile application.

Collect details: It takes under 2 minutes for our team member to register a voter, once they identify an unregistered one. They will collect the correct details and enter the data to register them.

Application: A back-end team the uses this data to fill in an online enrollment form on the Election Commission Website.

Tracking status: Our team also tracks status of the application form submitted to the EC and complete all formalities till the voter is issued with a Voter ID.

Missing Voters has already been rolled out and has captured 17,000 applications from unregistered voters so far. Out of the 4,120 Assembly Constituencies in India, our team has only been able to identify 6.8 million households from early 649 Assembly Constituencies. As we work towards the aim of identifying, reaching out to, and registering the maximum number of missing voters before the upcoming 2019 general elections, we understand the need to balance the privacy and data security of the potential voters along with the transparency and access to data that have enabled our work. This will help us develop a workable solution and scalable example of working towards balancing the cross-section of rights like right to privacy and access to information and transparency without them working at cross-purposes with each other.

This solution brings together the technological expertise of RayLabs and the Digital Empowerment Foundation’s (DEF’s) long experience in research and advocacy on human rights online. This partnership aims to implement an approach of incorporating privacy by design through vulnerability mapping of the enrolment chain of digital identification systems and developing targeted design features that balance users’ privacy rights while retaining the functionality of data systems handling digital identification data with a focus on the importance of deploying such methodologies at the design stage rather than post-roll out. 

The solution leverages the dispersed democratic potential facilitated by proliferating smartphone penetration in India. This has enabled the scaling up of the missing voter identification methodology through the ‘Missing Voter’ app. The easy interface and process of registration is designed to complement and augment the institutional process by identifying and flagging up the numbers of missing voters for formal enrolment with the facility of tracking the status of the registration until formal filing and submission to the election authorities, thereby ensuring democratic inclusion and political participation.

The app works through volunteers collecting the information on missing voters required to fill the registration form on the Election Commission website. This includes sensitive personal information like name, address, phone number, along with photograph of proof of address etc. This information is accessed by vetted data-entry volunteers to fill the official election registration form and update the registration from app-based registration until filing and official verification. As a result of this and the use of volunteers to amplify reach (esp. in cases of low literacy), the privacy-by-design components are envisioned to work towards delivering privacy, security, and transparency. The aim is to develop these features through accessible and easily understandable privacy policy, working on no in-app screenshots to avoid data-capture, only in-app camera to prevent storage of image files containing sensitive personal data in personal devices of volunteers (as per the code, image files get deleted from their personal devices upon clicking ‘Submit’), ensuring that the image files are in non-printable formats, collecting only information required to file official voter registration, and ensuring that the data is only stored on the server of the app and is deleted after a set expiration period.

Despite its stated aim of inclusion of India’s underserved communities within social protection schemes, the Aadhaar digital identification database had been in the news on account of data breaches from the system which had led to the leakage of sensitive personal information of a large number of Indian citizens; thereby undermining their privacy, safety, and security. The main risk areas arose from the ability of private entities to seed with the Aadhaar database as part of their e-KYC (e-Know Your Customer) as well as private contractors recruited for enrolment. As result of this enrolment was shifted to institutions like banks and post-offices. This solution highlights how technological processes which have to carry sensitive personal and easily identifiable information can incorporate design features which can prevent misuse, misappropriation, and security breaches. These design features provide a template for how to identify and secure risk areas through risk mapping in the usage chain and making granular changes in user design to safeguard users while preserving functionality.

The design solutions are based on the principles of balancing user rights and functionality that facilitates inclusion in social, economic, and democratic process. The privacy by design processes envisioned in this solution were developed after carefully evaluating the data handling streams and practical interfaces with the data. The solution aims to develop a governance framework and incorporate practical features that minimize the number of data interfaces with multiple handlers leading to minimization of points of vulnerability. The approach of vulnerability mapping and design of features are scalable and replicable across similar systems handling similar data categories with inclusion aims. 

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Missing Voters app is aimed at reaching the underserved and marginalised who are ones who are most often excluded from the electoral process. With the caveat that it only works online, it caters to low literacy levels through volunteers who help to onboard the missing voters. However, a lighter version of the app is also envisioned to work on low-data and low-connectivity environments.

The app aims to ensure that no eligible voter in India is left behind. It will work towards this aim through technological improvements, research, campaign and advocacy. The current statistics of adoption of the app, 3 months after launch, provides positive indication towards registration and enrolment of voters. It is installed by 6986 users in 468 out of 543 Parliamentary constituencies in India. The aim is to reach the maximum, if not the sum total, of estimated missing voters in India. Apart from direct beneficiaries, it provides scalable solutions for process and development of targeted, principled, and rights-protective design features. 

The solution submitted as a part of this challenge is a partnership between RayLabs, the developers of the Missing Voters app, and the Digital Empowerment Foundation (DEF), a NGO working on information and communication technologies for development (ICT4D), access to information, and human rights online in India for the past 16 years. The Missing Voters app is distillation of the methodology and research developed by RayLabs and Centre for Research and Debates in Development Policy (CRDDP). The current expansion of the Missing Voters initiative and campaign is also anchored through DEF.

The partnership between RayLabs and DEF shows a combination of technological skill and long experience in research and advocacy on human rights online. This enables the team to translate rights-based principles of privacy into actual design-based features. It also helps to develop a process for integrating privacy by design features by identifying points of vulnerability through efficient mapping of the on-ground implementation process while at the same time working within a principled  framework of data governance. 

The RayLabs initiative has so far been funded by grants and donations. In the interest of long-term sustainability, the aim is to adopt DEF’s community entrepreneurship model used for its access to entitlement programme called Soochnapreneur (trans. Information Entrepreurship). Under this model, the volunteers would charge a nominal fee for providing door-to-door voter data collection services for filing the official registration form on the election commission website as a part of service delivery. This payment would go to the volunteers for providing their time for this initiative and serve as an added incentive to spur voter registrations. Boosting this model would be DEF’s local and community-level presence across some of India’s rural and underserved communities from the past 16 years. It is present in more than 300 locations across India which can potentially provide the hub for the Missing Voters initiative to amplify its reach, complemented by the presence of more than 300 ground staff present on location.

The main aim behind applying to the Mission Billion Challenge is because of the close alignment of its objective with the Missing Voters app of fostering inclusivity by extending the basic political right of right to vote. This opportunity will help RayLabs and DEF to leverage this unique collaboration to provide workable solution translating privacy principles into vulnerability mapping process and design for their actual implementation. This will also help to provide the much needed impetus to propel expansion to incorporate the technological adoption of privacy principles that are backed critical evaluation of implementation process and vulnerability mapping.

The solution is indebted to and dependent on volunteers, which determines the speed of expansion. Moreover, numerous regional languages in India present a substantial challenge for inclusion of volunteers who are not conversant in English. The app is currently available only in English and Hindi with the potential of being developed across regional Indian languages, which will help amplify inclusion and expansion. The Election Commission of India (ECI) currently uploads their data as image based pdf files which require additional steps for text-based conversion. If ECI can upload the data in text-based formats that would substantially speed up the process.