EVM controversy in Indian elections

The use of electronic voting machines (EVM) in India is in full swing despite countless objections raised about them. Although this would be the fifth general election held in India solely through EVM’s but strong doubts about their veracity continuously persist.

The dissatisfaction about EVM’s has gone to a very high level as their manipulation by the Modi government is widely condemned and it is now acknowledged that they are used for furthering the political gains of Modi and his party. It is also recognised that the EVM manipulation has also sucked in the Election Commission of India (ECI) that gradually has lost its reputation of impartiality. Modi regime is blamed to be particularly adept at taking undue advantage of the electoral practice of the country including EVMs.

The ECI has been using EVMs since long and abandoned the use of ballot paper in 2004 and has persisted in its use despite mounting objections from the entire political spectrum except BJP and its allies. While ECI was perfecting the use of EVMs, other countries that used them expressed reservations about them.

Germany’s highest court threw a spanner in the works in 2009 by ruling in favour of a complaint which had pointed out that EVMs require voters to have blind faith in technology as by pushing a button in the machine, they could not be sure if their vote had gone to the intended candidate, in contrast to marking/ stamping the paper ballot. Germany abandoned the machine and stuck to the paper ballot.

Under the Modi regime ECI persisted in modifying the EVMs so that they remain valid and functional. It took steps to get around the weaknesses attributed to the EVMs and introduced the Voter Verified Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT). What it did was to bring about a third machine known as the VVPAT unit that works as a connection between the ballot unit on which voters push the button of their choice and the control unit in which the votes are recorded. In this case when a voter pushes a button, the VVPAT is instructed to print a chit with the name and symbol of the chosen candidate. The chit remains visible to the voter for seven seconds through a glass window after which it drops into a concealed compartment. Considering it a viable devise the ECI employed this three-unit machine on trial basis in 2014 and adopted it for the entire general election in 2019.

Much to the consternation of its opponents, the VVPAT raised more issues than it resolved. The first issue is that though the voter can see which candidate he has voted for but there is no surety whether VVPAT unit has correctly conveyed the same to the control/storage unit.

To complicate the matters the names and symbols of candidates are uploaded to VVPAT units after nominations and allotment of symbols are finalised by using the method of attaching an external device, mostly a laptop, to the unit. This action opens doors for EVMs exposure to malware that could be conveniently manipulated by hackers. Initially the two-unit machine has no port for external devices and moreover it recognised candidates only as numbers but after addition of VVPAT the EVMs became easy target for manipulation.

It is reported that while counting paper chits stored in VVPAT machines randomly selected from amongst all used in a constituency segment are manually counted also but here the problem begins as there is no agreeable solution once counts do not tally with the machine count. Political parties and many experts have been consistently demanding the hand count of the chits from the VVPATs but the ECI has been adamantly opposed to such demands as it feared that higher incidences between hand and machine count will breed more controversy. Another issue is that after the end of voting the machines are stored in counting rooms for weeks before final results are announced and the apprehensions about their safe keeping during this long duration.

In order to allay the apprehensions, the ECI launched an app in 2019 that provided two-hourly updates on the turnout in real numbers but during the current elections it issued the turnout only in percentage terms compelling a party to take the matter to the Supreme Court but it refrained from issuing directives making ECI decided to publish the turnout details in real numbers, however this belated action is simply insufficient to allay the fears expressed by the political spectrum strengthening the impression of the manipulation of EVMs.

Interestingly it was the BJP, which, after losing second time in a row to the Manmohan Singh-led alliance in 2009 vehemently badmouthed the EVMs and blamed that the party lost because the machines were rigged. The party activists fixed the blame of the defeat of BJP’s prospective PM LK Advani squarely of EVMs but Narendra Modi turned turtle and became their staunchest supporter and has assiduously refused to go back to ballot paper that brings enormous transparency to the electoral process.