Hotmail co-founder Sabeer Bhatia has called on replacing Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) with a secure voting app, saying it could help address what he described as problems with voter identification.
In a post on X, Bhatia stated that his proposed system would work by having each voter declare their identity and Indian citizenship, followed by AI assisted identity verification. He suggested that the discrepancies detected by the system could be flagged for human review.
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Based on Bhatia's description, voters would first identify themselves and declare that they are Indian citizens, while an AI-assisted system would be used to verify the identity information. The system as described by him would flag discrepancies detected during verification for review rather than automatically rejecting every discrepancy.
This is not the first time that Bhatia has proposed developing a voting app and argued that several sectors, including food delivery, banking, transportation and online dating, had already shifted to digital platforms, the Economic Times reported.
In that earlier proposal, Bhatia suggested that India could develop a secure digital voting system and also argued that such technology could potentially become a global business opportunity.
Meanwhile, the Election Commission has separately been developing its own digital platform called ECINET, but the initiative is not an announcement to replace EVMs with online voting.
According to the Election Commission's May 2025 announcement, ECINET was designed as a single digital interface integrating more than 40 existing ECI mobile and web applications.
The ECI's current website describes ECINET as a comprehensive digital platform connecting citizens, candidates and political parties and election officials with electoral services.
Bhatia's proposal, however, leaves several operational and security questions open, including how an app-based system would accommodate citizens without smartphones or dependable internet connectivity. These issues were also raised in response to his post, where a user questioned how people without smartphones would vote and raised concerns about the reliability of AI-based verifications.
Other issues that would need to be addressed in any such system include protecting voter identity data, ensuring ballot secrecy, preventing unauthorised access and establishing an independently auditable mechanism for verifying election results.
These are considerations for any proposed digital voting system and are not features that the ECI has said it is implementing through ECINET.
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