If you are not aware about the location of your polling station or are worried about waiting in a queue to vote, here is an election mobile application that you can rely on.

Assessing the need of the public through a specialized Knowledge, Attitude and Practices (KAP) survey, the Election Commission has come out with Chunavana mobile application. The survey had revealed that 25% of people who did not vote stayed away because they were not aware of their polling stations, 17.5 % of the urban voters did not vote because of long queues at the polling stations, and 7.5 % of the urban voters did not vote because they are unaware of their candidates.

Briefing presspersons about the app, Chief Electoral Officer (CEO) Sanjiv Kumar said it has mapped all the 56,696 polling stations as per their boundaries. This is the first of its kind in the country, he claimed.

The app, which will soon be extended to other mobile operating systems, will ease the difficulty of finding the polling station and Assembly constituency. Citizens can navigate to the polling station with ease and avoid traffic on the day of the poll to reach the polling station. They can also see the candidates contesting in their constituency, their educational qualification, political affiliations and other details, he said.

That is not all. The app will also enable wheelchair booking for senior citizens and persons with disabilities in the polling booths. They can register on the app and the facility will be made available for them. The app can not only be used during the time of elections but also during the time of addition of names into the electoral roll for new voters and during the time of distress to reach the nearest police stations and health centres.

Web portal

The Karnataka Election Information System is a GIS-based web portal which is a one stop information portal for elections in Karnataka. The portal contains all information about the polling stations and assemblies, their boundaries and facilities available in the polling stations. The population details, voter details, trends in previous elections, candidates, winning margins and comparisons are also provided for the citizens to understand the democracy in play. “We are also working on making the results available on the app on counting day,” he added.