In a move to further strengthen the voter education programme through use of technology and encourage the youth to participate in the electoral process, Delhi’s Chief Electoral Office held an online social media training session with officials concerned and exhorted participants to disseminate information using an official social media handle to create awareness among voters.
Delhi’s Chief Electoral Officer (CEO) Dr Ranbir Singh said that the motive behind this training was to impart knowledge, skill and expertise to election officials at all levels for using social media to actualize the mission of the Election Commission of India (ECI) that no voter should be left behind.
“Today’s youth is tech-savvy and spends lot of time on social media. We should, therefore, interact with them where they spend their time and motivate them to become proud voters of our great democracy,” he said.
Many aspects of social media platforms were discussed in this informative training session. While commencing the social media training session, Dr Singh said, “Today social media has become indispensable and is eclipsing even the mainstream media in its reach and content diversity. It has enabled people belonging to each section of society to directly converse about issues affecting them and share suggestions. Now, campaigns are not confined to just posters and banners. Social media campaigns are full of info-commercials, advertisements, blog posts, and lakhs of tweets, Instagram posts and Facebook posts that create a much stronger and wider impact.”
Dr Singh further said, “A specific Social Media Cell under the supervision of JL Gupta, Nodal Officer (Social Media) is assisting the Chief Electoral Officer to strengthen voter awareness and electoral participation. This social media cell aims to provide innovative solutions to spread voter awareness to a wide range of audience. The Chief Electoral Office is committed to increase the youth enrolment by its awareness drive on numerous platforms of social media.”
The CEO also said, “Electoral Literacy Clubs (ELC)" exists at schools, colleges and different workplaces to propagate voter awareness. They, too, can leverage the power of social media. The aim is to further enhance the reach of the social media accounts of CEO, DEOs, EROs and ELCs. This can help in disseminating far and wide the desired voter awareness messages.”
