I can vouch for the fact that the Election Commission's web site crashed early in the morning of counting day and stayed that way till the next day. Even now th

I can vouch for the fact that the Election Commission's web site crashed early in the morning of counting day and stayed that way till the next day. Even now there is no detailed data available on the voting - the number of registered voters per constituency, the number of votes each party got, etc (there is only the winners vote count, 3 days after the election!). With the large number of candidates in each constituency, the candidate/partywise listing is critical for any detailed analysis. From what I've seen of government websites( I do a lot of work for the Indian Defence Dept) most of them run on single Win XP "servers". The EC server was a (set of) Windows machine (s)(I got an ASPX error saying (effectively) "IIS crashed" :-P). The local subcontractors that write programs for the government have atrocious development skills and are usually people who can't get jobs in the Indian IT industry (the standards are low there too, but that is another story) The one department that gets its backend right is the Indian Railways (the front end design is completely unusable, as with other govt departments). Oh yeah the government spokesman is clueless, as someone else pointed out already.