This is the second part of The Wire’s investigation into booth management apps used during elections. Read part one here. 

New Delhi/Hyderabad: “Eighty-seven elections, 25 parties, 24 states and 46 campaigns in India,” are the statistics that greet you on RajMarga’s website, one of the booth management apps that The Wire investigated as part of this series.

These numbers alone indicate the volume of their operations, which clearly exceed those of any IT cell deployed by political parties. Except RajMarga is not alone in this operation.

In part one of the series, we explained how these apps are used to print voter slips with party symbols and can aid voter profiling through surveys and messaging campaigns.

On further investigation, we found that these apps, used by multiple rival candidates and parties, accessed all their information from a common server. This means that a single data broker supplied the software, resulting in all the apps contacting its main server –  voterapp.in – for downloading voter data.

The Wire reverse engineered these apps and found that the same 'code base’ was used for multiple apps with similar Android package names that followed a specific naming format, such as this: rajyog.member****.alldata. The **** would be replaced by a unique app ID for each candidate.

While the apps were configured with special banner images of candidates to make them look different, not all of them work when installed, as each app was configured to work during a specific election period.

The information available in the source code allowed us to trace a network of companies selling the same “VoterApp” under different brand names – VoterApps, Vijayam, Mantri, Chanakya, RajMarga, RajyogPlus, RajyogPro, Sattadhish, SanghNayak and DigiFace.

Each of these brands are essentially the same app being marketed by different private companies. The exact reason why this branding strategy was adopted by the developer remains unclear.

The Wire was able to retrieve information from their application programming interfaces (APIs) and found a list of clients to whom the application was sold, the election it was used for, the salesperson who sold the app and the brand name that app was sold under.

We found over 4,000 candidates who had used these apps under one brand name or another, during different elections in India. We are publishing this information so everyone can examine the scale of these operations and to disclose the details of candidates who might not have declared the usage of these apps as part of their election expenditure, as mandated by the Election Commission (EC).

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