1. Home
2. Columnist

Voting machines with paper audit to clear doubts

By Yashwardhan Joshi. Dated: 4/24/2017 12:19:17 AM

Now the largest democracy will show to the world what elections are all about. At a time when most of the countries have discarded electronic voting machines (EVMs), India will further demonstrate their relevance in conducting free and fair elections in a large swathe of land with a population of over one billion people.
The Election Commission of India is set to enter another historic phase when voter verified paper audit trail (VVPAT) will be introduced in the conduct of an entire General Election, in 2019, a move that will supplement the transparency of the poll process and allay apprehensions in the minds of the voters about the fidelity and integrity of the EVMs.
The demand for linking EVMS with VVPAT, a system to verify and audit the votes in the form of a paper trail, was made by political parties way back in 2010, after many years of doubt-casting over the credibility of the EVMs by the losers. In 2013, the Supreme Court, on a PIL, directed the government to provide money for the procurement of VVPAT devices. Since then, the Election Commission has been demanding the release of requisite funds, and funds they do have come in but only in a trickle, not enough to buy the adequate number of devices.
It was, however, the recent Uttar Pradesh Assembly polls that unwittingly accelerated the demand for the release of fully paper-based Lok Sabha elections. The trigger was pulled by Mayawati when she alleged tampering of EVMs by the winning BJP after her Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) suffered a heavy loss in those elections. All the other losers hanged on to her tail to fervently raise doubts over the reliability of the EVMs and demanded paper trail of votes cast in future elections.
And with the poll body relentlessly pursuing the case, the Union Cabinet finally approved release of Rs 3,173 crore for purchasing 1.615 million VVPAT units. Chief Election Commissioner Nazim Zaidi, in a letter to Law Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad, had said that the procurement of VVPAT devices cannot be delayed any longer given the prevailing environment. And going by its zealousness in conducting unbiased elections, it is quite apparent that the EC will place the order this month so that the machines are delivered by September-October 2018, in time for the 2019 General Election.
And that should, for all times to come, make politicians like Arvind Kejriwal sober. To silence the naysayers, the EC will closely monitor the production of VVPAT devices to be manufactured by the government-owned Bharat Electronics Limited (BEL) and Electronics Corporation of India Limited (ECIL) . Towards this year end, we may also see 100 per cent paper trail voting in the Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh Assembly elections.
The Election Commission already has 55,000 VVPAT machines which were deployed in recent Assembly polls in Goa (all 40 constituencies) and Punjab (33 of 117 constituencies). In Gujarat and Himachal, it needs roughly 25,000 more such machines for which it has reportedly placed orders with the two PSUs.
In the meantime, the Commission will try and clear all doubts of the losers in the efficacy of the EVMS. It has called a meeting of political parties in the first week of May at its headquarters where it will display the EVMs for about 10 days for the doubters to demonstrate that the machines can be tampered with. The exercise is meant to assure people that EVMs are reliable and are not susceptible to hacking and, thus, cannot be corrupted at any stage of their design, manufacture and use, as alleged by the BSP and the Aam Aadmi Party.
Hope Kejriwal turns up! He had said that he knows at least 10 ways to manipulate the EVMs, he being an IIT engineer.
In 2009 when such exercise was taken up, nobody had turned up. This time, the EC has again thrown up a challenge to reassure that it is an impartial body that conducts elections in a transplant manner. In 2019 the world will see casting of ballots through paper trails by hundreds of millions of people. It was the losers' demand that has led to the ushering in of this historic move; the winners didn't press for it as they had nothing to gain India has, thus, showed to the world that in a democracy, it's not the winner that takes all; the loser, too, has a place in the sun.
Yashwardhan Joshi is a Journalist of long standing and commentator on issues of Administration and Social Issues.
—[IFS]