In January 2024, the Election Commission of India (Goa) engaged us to design the surveillance and communications infrastructure protecting the state's Electronic Voting Machines through the 2024 general election cycle. Two locations were identified as temporary strongrooms — one in North Goa, one in South Goa. For obvious reasons, those locations remain undisclosed.
The brief carried one constraint that shaped every other decision: once the vaults were sealed at the close of polling, they could not be reopened until counting day. Not for a faulty switch. Not for a failed camera. Not for a power supply that picked that week to give up. Every component specified had to outlive the entire window — through the polling phase, through transit, through the wait, through counting, through the formation of the new government.
A single brief: assume everything will fail
When you cannot open the room to fix anything, the design question stops being “what hardware should we use?” and becomes “what happens when each piece fails?” The architecture is the answer.
Every rack carried redundant power feeds. Every PoE switch was paired with an identical twin. Cameras were placed in overlapping fields of view, so that if any single unit went dark the surveillance footprint of the strongroom remained complete. NVRs were specified as mirrored pairs, writing parallel streams so that the chain of custody on disk could not be broken by a single point of failure.
24×7 recording in this context was not a feature claim. It was the structural property the architecture had to guarantee, because nobody would be there to notice if it stopped.
Beyond the vaults: counting day
The brief extended to the counting infrastructure. Goa has 40 assembly constituencies — 20 in each district. On counting day, all of them converged into two counting halls: one in North Goa, one in South Goa. Each constituency required its own counting area within the hall, with five to six counting stations each, taking the floor count to approximately 200 stations across the two venues — before media rooms, observer rooms, and auxiliary spaces were factored in.
Our design covered network, PA, and intercom infrastructure for the major facilities: the two district headquarters and the larger constituencies. The network specification called for multiple ISP feeds with distinct providers and distinct physical paths, for genuine redundancy rather than the cosmetic kind where two “different” connections share a single last-mile fibre. A separate Wi-Fi and wired layout served observers, officials, and reporting systems on the floor. PA systems handled hall-wide announcements. Intercoms gave returning officers a private channel that did not depend on cellular networks, which historically buckle under counting-day load. For broadcast operations, the design included an active LED video wall and a media center built for the high-bandwidth demands of live result dissemination.
What the engagement delivered
Two strongroom designs, one per district. A counting-day infrastructure plan covering the two consolidated counting halls and their major constituency facilities — network, PA, intercom, broadcast — with the redundancy posture documented at every layer. The Election Commission proceeded with the design as specified.
What this engagement demonstrates
When the cost of a failure is unrecoverable — when there is no second visit, no support call, no swap-and-restart — redundancy stops being a feature you add to a design. It becomes the design itself. Every other decision arranges itself around that constraint.
That principle is not unique to elections. It applies anywhere the room can't be reopened, the system can't be paused, or the audit trail can't have a gap: hospitals, data centres, broadcast infrastructure, anything mission-critical. The engagement in Goa was an unusually clean expression of it, but the discipline travels.