Why doesn't the Election Commission of India website open?

Khaleej Times, a well-known English newspaper of the United Arab Emirates, had printed a news a month ago under the title that the Commission's website was not available to non-resident Indians. "Indian citizens in UAE, Canada, America, UK and Saudi Arabia are complaining about not being able to access the Election Commission's website," journalist Mazhar Faruqi said in the news, "Indian diplomats, workers and overseas who want to get the latest information about candidates, voters, polling stations etc. Other expatriate citizens are disappointed and fed up after the website does not open. An Indian in Saudi Arabia told journalist Farooqui that the site did not open even when using VPN.

According to the Indian media The Hindu, the commission has not given any response on this . However, government websites are often geofenced for security reasons. In the language of cyber security, geofencing means the information technology system and the content within it (security through obscurity). Restricting access in this way makes it easy to evade cyber attacks from abroad. "Geofencing does not play much of a role in preventing cyber attacks or data breaches from within the country," an Indian information security expert known online as Nemo told The Hindu. It also hinders the right of access to information of researchers, historians and others.'

The Wayback Machine operated by the Internet Archive, the world's largest organization helping to archive Internet webpages, has been unable to archive the Election Commission of India's website for the past few months. Nemo, an information security expert who has studied the websites geofenced by the Indian government in the past, has created a 'proxy service' for some websites to make it easier for overseas Indians who want to view the content of such websites in 2020. The Government of India has also geo-fenced the Rajya Sabha website, so it cannot be accessed from any other country including Nepal.