The Hindu : Front Page : A one stop cybershop for elections

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Monday, May 12, 2008
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A one stop cybershop for elections

Anand Parthasarathy

Indian-American Ravi Singh’s ElectionMall fuel over 600 campaigns

— Photo: Special Arrangement

HIGH-FLYING: Founder CEO of ElectionMall with Democratic presidential candidate Hilary Clinton.

Bangalore: A Washington-based Indian-American runs an Internet portal that puts the ‘e’ into election campaigns of all kinds from local civic polls to union contests — to the U.S. presidential election.

It is called ElectionMall ( www.electionmall.com) and it has a simple motto: Everyday is a campaign. Left unsaid is the corollary: any one: political parties, individual candidates, citizen groups, promoters — even lay voters — can run a campaign if one has conviction.

ElectionMall does the rest: creates web pages and campaign literature, manages staff, helps raise funds, contact voters by email, fax and phone, organise election tours, even print and distribute tee shirts and other election materials.

“Governments harness technology in their own way to run elections — but today the Internet empowers every citizen individually or in groups to run campaigns, just as efficiently,” says Ravi Singh the U.S.-born Indian and founder CEO of ElectionMall.

He spoke to The Hindu during a 3-day visit to his home land last week, an exploratory trip to try and network with other Information Technology players here who might like to join in setting up an ElectionMall in India before the anticipated General Elections next year. The company runs a ‘democracy technology optimisation’ development effort in Delhi, called eSolutions.

“In 2007 alone, we ran 634 campaigns in the U.S. — for all parties — taking over the entire operation in a Software-as-a-service (SoaS) mode,” Mr Singh added. A Masters in political science, he first began harnessing the Internet in the 1996 U.S. presidential elections, while working as an administrative assistant to the Illinois State governor. He was the first Asian American and the first Sikh to run for office in the Illinois General assembly. By 1999, he had started ElectionMall to provide non partisan technology for candidates to win elections harnessing the Net.

By 2004, it became the largest and fastest growing campaign technology provider in the U.S. Today the mall claims to have touched 23 million voters and created 18,000 e-leaders.

“In the U.S. alone we are touching a $10 billion market — worldwide, the potential is $65 billion,” Mr. Singh says. But he believes there is more to cyber-campaigns than the money in it.

He points to www.my.barackobama.com or the John McCain Space where thousands of lay citizens are able to run campaigns they believe in to take on the organised party efforts. “With technology like this politics can be a level playing field,” he feels.

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