The State election authority is faced with teething troubles in the implementation of the ERO Net, the platform created by the Election Commission of India to store the data of voters from across the country.

While the number of applications seeking fresh enrolment under the voters’ list as also the applications from the voters who found their votes deleted has been mounting, officials are facing difficulties in entering the data online through the ERO Net owing to the slow speed of the network.

Deadline

The election authority, the office of the Chief Electoral Officer, received close to 24 lakh applications a day before the September 25 deadline set by the Election Commission for filing claims and objections relating to revised summary revision of electoral rolls.

Officials said there was drastic slow down in the pace at which these new applications were being processed in the newly deployed software.

Surge load

“Registering each application online is taking a few minutes owing to the slow network,” an official said. Sources said this was because of the “surge load”, sudden rush of entries from different points into the network that was delaying the entire process.

Officials monitoring the IT-related applications explained that in the normal course, IT applications will be designed to meet certain load and it would be capable of absorbing around 25 per cent more load than anticipated. The revision of schedule for the SSR had, however enhanced the load multi-fold, thereby affecting the speed of the network.

“Applications are not designed on the peak load as it would be a seasonal phenomenon, not a regular occurrence. Moreover, costs involved in developing such application would make it unviable in the longer run as 90% of the load has to be kept idle,” an official explained.

Issue discussed

Sources said the CEO’s office had discussed the issue with senior officials of the Election Commission as also those from the National Informatics Corporation and other wings looking after the network related issues a couple of days ago.

The network is likely to come back to normalcy once the deadline for submission of forms online expires on Tuesday as the flow of data would come down significantly.