KOCHI: As the Congress leadership continues to wrestle with the question of who should be Kerala’s next chief minister, social media has been having a field day. Memes, reels, and troll posts around the suspense-filled decision have flooded the internet over the past few days. But amid the satire and speculation, one Reddit user decided to take things a step further—by creating a public voting platform for the CM race.
A Reddit user going by the name ‘Pachakulam_Bhasi’ bought the UDF Keralam domain and transformed it into an online poll where anyone can vote for their preferred chief ministerial candidate.
Explaining how it all began, the user shared the story on Reddit. “I was doom-scrolling through Instagram and came across the UDF Keralam profile. Saw the website link in their bio and clicked it out of curiosity. The domain wasn’t even hosted,” the post read. Curiosity soon turned into an experiment. “Developer curiosity kicked in, so I checked whether the domain was available to purchase. And somehow it actually was. So I bought it and turned it into a public Keralam CM voting platform where anyone can vote for whom they want as the next chief minister of Kerala,” the user wrote.
The website—UDFKeralam.com—allows one vote per device and also features a live vote tracker and a public comment section.
When TNIE accessed the website on Friday afternoon, more than 1,000 votes had already been cast. Former Leader of Opposition V D Satheesan was comfortably ahead with 786 votes, while fellow contenders K C Venugopal and Ramesh Chennithala trailed behind with 78 and 140 votes respectively. A few users had even floated the name of Shashi Tharoor in the comments section.
The unusual initiative quickly caught the attention of netizens, many of whom praised the Reddit user’s creativity. Others jokingly advised him to “lawyer up”, warning of possible legal complications. Some users speculated that the domain itself could become valuable in the future.
One commenter also recalled a similar embarrassment faced by Congress in the past. “A similar thing happened some time ago. Congress started a campaign for donations and launched a website. The domain was not registered, and someone at BJP grabbed it and set up a redirect to their donations page,” the user wrote.