Poll counting: The ECG, EVM and twitter world

New Delhi, Dec 20: India is a nation of billion opinions. This was more than apparent on Thursday (Dec 20). The great communication revolution today brought

into drawing rooms with housewives, common man with a mobile phone and activists turning experts.

The urban India tweeted and the media house went overboard to dissect the predictable outcome of elections in Gujarat and surprise result in Himachal Pradesh.

It looked like the EVM (electronic voting machine) was connected to an ECG machine. Unlike ballot sheets, the EVM counting does not give a good picture of the trend. In the era of ballot papers, all the ballots were mixed and counted. But with the EVMs, the counting is tabulation of votes of each machine. Since no mixing is done, every booth EVMs will display majority for one or the other party. In this method, till the end, whatever is the trend is bound to be tricky unless there is a one sided victory.

Hence, with every trend updated every other second, the heartbeat increased or decreased depending on which side of the fence the viewer was positioned.

The participation of the public may have been more urban but then India is turning urban at a faster rate than our savings bank interest. Most of the tweets of the election results were retweets as very few had access to source of unofficial or official figures. But the social media public was not shy of expressing stale and bits of news.

Welcome to the mobile democracy.

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