Election Result: Netizens experience the thrills online

Mangalore Today News Network

Mangalore, December 5: Day of counting of results, the `D-Day’ in any elections normally enthuses political parties and workers. Political leaders, candidates and supporters come to the centres and undergo a thousand emotions before a winner is declared. Bringing the counting centre drama live to the netizens, at least statistically, was the DK district administration which hosted the results live on its website www.dk.nic.in.

Brainchild of the district electoral officer Subodh Yadav, this new experiment hitherto not tried in any of the previous polls enabled one to see the round wise counting results online. The designated officers in each of the five counting centres across the district were issued the login and password which gave them access to Google Spreadsheet, where the round wise data was uploaded after certification by the returning officer.

This enabled Yadav, also the deputy commissioner to monitor the same at the media centre of the counting centre here. Each of the five counting centres was provided with broadband connectivity and a backup facility so that there was no breakdown in this continuous updating of the results. Yadav told that people are more interested in knowing how the counting is progressing and what are the trends as they emerge.

The reach of public address system outside counting centres is limited to those who are present there. But, if one is a hardcore political analyst and interested in numbers, then our experiment was the apt one, he avers. Admitting that the National Informatics Centre (NIC) has a election related software, he notes with NIC software one gets the final result after it is certified by the returning officer and not round by round details online.

The administration used features available in a search engine to devise this platform that enabled simultaneous dissemination of results from each of five counting centres. The only disadvantage, Yadav surmised in this effort could be that data is stored in a server outside India (since Google Spreadsheet was used) against NIC software where data is on an Indian server. Objective of early dissemination of results was clearly met, he noted. TOI