Delhi Chief Electoral Officer emphasizes importance of social media, technology in strengthening voter education, participation

New Delhi [India], September 24 : Emphasizing the importance of social media and technology in strengthening the voter education program and encouraging youth participation in electoral processes, Delhi Chief Electoral Officer (CEO), Dr Ranbir Singh on Friday said that social media has become indispensable in its reach and content diversity and has a much stronger and wider impact on the masses.
Singh's remarks came at an online training session with election officials on Friday where he discussed the importance of social media and technology in strengthening the voter education program and encouraging youth participation in electoral processes.
While commencing the social media training session, 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 the 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."
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 audiences. The Chief Electoral Office is committed to increasing the youth enrolment by its awareness drive on numerous platforms of social media."
He also talked about how the 'Electoral Literacy Clubs' at schools, colleges and workplaces can make use of social media in their aim of propagating voter awareness.

"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," Singh said.
Singh said that the aim of the session was to impart interest, knowledge, skill and expertise to election officials at all levels for using social media to achieve the mission of the Election Commission of India that 'no voter is left behind'.
"Today's youth is tech-savvy and spends a lot of their 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 added.

CEO Delhi also exhorted all participants to be active on their official social media accounts, be consistent in creating and sharing interesting and informative voter awareness content, engage with other relevant social media accounts and posts and expand the digital marketing footprint of the ECI for enhancing electoral awareness, registration and participation.
According to the official statement issued by the Delhi Chief Electoral Officer today, District Election Officers (DEO), SDM (Election), Electoral Registration Officers (ERO), Assistant Electoral Registration Officers (AERO) and the officers of CEO Headquarters were present for this session chaired by Singh.
Usage, importance and growth of different social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Youtube and Clubhouse were discussed. It was also discussed that how social media could be used to ramp up the process of passing on information to the target audience. Social media is one of the leading new platforms that enable sharing of information with maximum people in minimum time.
The session was followed by a question and answer session to clarify doubts and generate ideas and suggestions.