Serious Questions Raised About Election Commission Website, Developer Says: ‘Even Interns Don’t Write Such Crude Code’

Kathmandu: The Election Commission’s online voter registration system has come under fire on social media for using extremely weak and unprofessional code. Since biometric verification for voter registration is now linked with the national identity card, the Commission’s website has faced heavy traffic.

During this period, users experienced frequent server crashes, failed submissions, and repeated errors. In this context, developer Nischal Lamichhane analyzed the code on the Commission’s homepage and expressed strong dissatisfaction. He posted screenshots and comments on social media.

Lamichhane checked the code on November 14, 2025 at 1 pm and found the quality to be extremely poor. “This is not a bug,” he told TechPana. “Even a first-year computer science student can write better code than this. Its quality is questionable.”

According to him, the JavaScript code on the homepage contains errors rarely made even by interns learning software development.

Major errors seen in the code:

Irrational comparison: The code checks for a condition that is always true, such as ‘True’ == ‘True’, which is unnecessary and meaningless.

Repetition of the same condition: The same condition is written repeatedly in the same block, making the code look messy and disorganized.

Overwriting text up to three times: The same message is written in multiple ways, and only the last version takes effect. This negatively affects the software’s functionality.

Use of hardcoding: While this particular code poses no direct security risk, its poor structure shows that it is not efficient or maintainable. Some values appear “hardcoded,” though they may be coming from the backend. If so, Lamichhane says server-level validation would have been more appropriate. He adds that no vertical or horizontal scaling techniques appear to have been used.

“This is not the developer’s fault,” Lamichhane said. “In government work, no matter how big the budget is, the developer ends up getting very little. They deliver what they are paid for.” He argues that the government failed to prepare the server to handle the load when millions of citizens were trying to register, even though the system was struggling at just 35,000 daily users.

“Even Google Forms, which is free, can handle over 100,000 requests per day,” he said. “If proper techniques had been used, the server wouldn’t crash with only 35,000 users. Whoever built this system seems to have done it without thinking.”

Critics say government websites should be easy to maintain, readable, predictable, and capable of handling user pressure. But this code violates all such standards. “You can guess the quality of the backend code from this simple snippet,” Lamichhane said.

He added that it is shameful that Nepali developers can build systems that handle millions of users, yet a government website cannot manage normal traffic.

Other developers supported his statement. Integrated ICT Pvt. Ltd. founder Birodh Rijal wrote on social media, “We often ignore the technical aspects, which affects quality and cost.”

Developer Ashish Bist wrote, “Did the Nepal government fail to find a good developer, or did it not care? If low-quality code is deployed in a sensitive system like voter registration, it feels like they’re treating it as a ‘try-catch system.’” He warned that the Commission’s system is not a bachelor’s final-year project but a system used to run the country.

(If you notice any issues on a government website, you can submit them ​through this form.)

 

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