Webcasts from more than half the polling stations in the State helped cut down election-related fraud on polling day on Tuesday, election officials said.
In a major push to ensure free and fair elections, live monitoring and webcats had been arranged in 20,441 of the total 40,771 polling stations for the Assembly polls in the State.
Polling stations, including the ones tagged as critical and vulnerable, were placed under surveillance as per the Election Commission norms. Live feed from these booths was made available to the Returning Officers, District Collectors/District Election Officers and the central control room at the office of the Chief Electoral Officer (CEO), Teeka Ram Meena, in Thiruvananthapuram.
A team of 70 people were involved in monitoring the footage. The infrastructure for the extensive coverage was assiduously put together over the past several months.
“We had a team of officers who have been working in close coordination with the Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd, IT Mission and KELTRON on the facility. They did a wonderful job. The credit goes to them,” Mr. Meena said.
The team included Secretary and Additional CEO Sanjay Kaul who led the technical team; Additional CEO D. Balamurali, Deputy CEO V. R. Premkumar, and the nodal officer for the webcasting, Mr. Chandrasekhar. Several trials were carried out over the past months to ensure that the system functioned flawlessly.
