The election season has already begun in India. While a few states have already received their mandate, others are preparing to jump into the poll battle. One of the significant measures to gauge the success of the elections is the number of people who turn out to vote.
Historically, increasing the voting percentage has been a challenge. Regardless of which party ultimately wins, we would certainly agree that any Election result should reflect the majority’s will and subsequently define the future of any state or Country. Hence, improving the voting percentage is a noteworthy problem to solve.
Purely, from the Business point of view, this is a sizeable problem to solve. Let’s deep dive and apply Product Management principles to solve this.
What if we create an application or experience that not only solves the problem but revolutionizes the Political game?
Let’s begin by narrowing down the scope and outlining the business objective.
The business objective is to improve the voting percentage by making more voters turn up on Election day to cast their vote on the EVM.
Now, let’s start jotting down some of the pain points of voter participation. Not exhaustive.
- Issues with the Voter List preparation
- Conveyance and Logistics on the D-day
- Issues with Motivation & Awareness
Let’s delve deep into each of these to figure out which of these is a high-impact problem to solve.
Issues with the Voter List preparation:
It is not uncommon to come across issues with voter details, such as outdated or removed information, during the periodic voter survey conducted by the Election Commission. These issues can be due to systemic problems, and it often takes time to streamline the process. Unfortunately, voters may not be aware of these issues until election day or realize too late, losing their chance to vote. While there may not be much individuals can do to address these issues, being proactive and vigilant can help ensure that such issues are rectified before election day.
Conveyance and Logistics on the D-day:
Many voters, particularly those in rural areas, struggle to reach the polling booth due to a lack of proper transportation. This can result in low voter turnout. Unfortunately, providing transportation logistics on a large scale across the state is currently a challenging task due to a shortage of resources.
Although it can be a challenge, determined voters who are motivated to cast their ballot will overcome any obstacles and make it to the polling station. Therefore, this may not be a significant issue that requires a solution. Let’s move on to the next point of concern.
Issues with Motivation, Awareness & Desire :
There is a tendency among young voters, particularly those who are voting for the first time, to avoid political awareness campaigns. This could be attributed to negative perceptions of politics and a lack of understanding regarding the consequences of not participating in the electoral voting process. Some voters feel that their opinions may not be heard and their vote may not have a significant impact on the political scenario. Additionally, it is often challenging for voters to distinguish between the manifestos of different political parties, which makes it difficult for them to choose the right candidate to vote for.
Based on the aforementioned pain points, solving the motivation problem appears to be a high-impact and high-magnitude task.
Let’s summarize here and redefine our problem statement.
We are trying to achieve [Business Objective] by solving the [pain point] for [Persona]
We are trying to achieve [Improvent in Voting percentage] by solving the [Awareness/Motivational issues] for [Young voters]
Now that we have identified the problem, let’s get into the solution aspects of it.
Let’s brainstorm some of the solutions:
- Solution: To encourage young people to participate in politics and voting, it is important to create outreach programs that increase awareness. Candidates can reach out to online and offline forums, such as town hall sessions, to engage with young voters and resolve their queries.
- Solution: To make it easier for young people to learn about candidates and their election manifestos, a mini-platform can be created on social media sites like Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram. Candidates can publish their manifesto, profile, and roadmap in corporate-style formats that are easy to understand.
- Pre-poll: Before the election, separate groups can be created within the platform for voters to subscribe to. These groups can provide detailed information about party manifestos, accomplishments, vision, and roadmap in a format that is easily understandable to young people.
- Candidates can publish their profiles and accomplishments, which can be publicly validated.
- The platform can also provide the capability to compare and contrast the data of different parties and candidates, presenting it in a cleaner format.
- Post-poll: After the elections, the platform can convert the winning party’s manifesto into a more corporate-style format, VGI or OKRs, at both the party and candidate level to make them accountable. The data can be fed into the system that calculates baselined metrics regularly for monitoring purposes. This feed can be displayed on a dashboard that shows the ongoing metrics of different candidates, similar to a typical company’s quarterly financial results.
There could be a lot more solutions that can be thought through. Young people relate and engage when the below happens:
- Make the Politics and electoral process easy to comprehend
- Engage with them in their worlds (Social Media)
- Use Corporate-style formats (Dashboards/Charts) to compare & contrast the party’s Election manifesto/data.
- Show progress & achievements through data
- Create a sense of accountability using technology.
Of the above, solution#2 seems to be acceptable, if not radical, one to implement due to the following reasons:
- Highly Impactful
- Less cumbersome as social media is being used
- Low Complexity, High Value
- Actionable
Trade-offs:
Here are some trade-offs to consider.
- Legal implications of publishing restricted Govt information.
- Religious commitment to keeping the data up to date on the social media platform.
- Data privacy and trust issues. The data needs to be validated by institutions.
- Adoption challenges as the party’s credibility will be at stake as the date is more verifiable and public.
The suggested solution may seem unrealistic, but we never know if a major party implements it, and others will follow due to FOMO.
Don’t believe it?? Read below
In the past, people were often hesitant to disclose information about their employer, such as which company they worked for, even during casual offline conversations. However, LinkedIn has disrupted this mindset, and now many individuals feel a fear of missing out if they don’t have a LinkedIn account.
We never know what’s in store for Politics!