Do we need Electronic Voting Machines? Are they tamper- proof? If we decide to abandon the EVMs what is the alternative? Go back to the old ballot paper system? The debate about efficacy of EVMs has surfaced once again after the recent five state Assembly polls. Political leaders who lost – BSP’s Mayawati, Uttarakhand’s Harish Rawat and Delhi’s Arvind Kejriwal among them – have alleged that the EVMs were tampered with. At least 16 Opposition parties have joined the chorus.
A delegation of 13 Opposition parties met President Pranab Mukherjee on Wednesday over the matter. “The recent cases of alleged tampering and malfunctioning of EVM machines, particularly in the recently concluded assembly elections, have raised bona fide concerns on the possibility of manipulating electoral outcomes,” they told Mukherjee in a memorandum. On Monday, they had approached the Commission, expressing their “complete loss of faith” in EVMs and demanded use of VVPAT (voter-verified paper audit trail) and paper ballots in upcoming polls.
After all these, the Supreme Court has come into the picture again by issuing a notice to the Centre and the Election Commission this week as to why paper trails should not be mandatory. The issue has been raised earlier before various High Courts – Madras High Court (2002); Karnataka High Court (2001); Delhi High Court (2004) and Bombay High Court (Nagpur bench) in 2004 but all held that the EVMs are credible. Even the Apex court dismissed appeals against High Court orders.
India has more than 800 million voters and about 1.2 million EVMs are used for the elections. The complaints were on two counts. First was that technology could be tampered with. The second was a legal challenge. In both cases, the final word has not come. Is there a possibility of rigging the polls in the next general elections? This question has arisen not only because of the unexpected number of seats won or lost by parties in the recent contest but also accentuated by the recent trend in the West doubting the integrity of EVMs and bringing back the ‘old-fashioned ballot system’.
The Election Commission claims that the programme or software is burnt into a one time programmable or Masked chip so that it cannot be tampered with. Moreover, the machines are not networked either by wire or by wireless to any other machine and so there is no possibility of data corruption. Also the elaborate security arrangments would prevent any administrative or procedural manipulation according to the CEC.
The naysayers argue that when bank data could be hacked why not the EVMs? They point out how Western countries have gone against E-voting, especially in the US, Germany, Netherlands, France, Italy, England and Ireland to name a few. These countries have gone back to the ballots.
Why did India move towards the EVMs? It all began in 1977 when the Election Commission mooted the idea. The arguments for moving to EVMs were because of some inherent problems like printing, storage and trasnportation of ballots besides the huge financial expenditure.
The counting also took a much longer time. Parliament amended the law in December 1988 and a new section 61A was inserted in the Representation of the People Act, 1951 empowering the Commission to use voting machines. It was implemented in March 1989. Since 2000, EVMs have been used in 107 polls including for the Lok Sabha and state assemblies.
The debate about EVMs is not new, as it has been going on since the time it was introduced in 1989. The Commission favoured EVMs because the method of casting your vote by the click of a button would have been tamper proof except that the doubting Thomases raise the question of their efficacy time and again. As early as 2009, BJP’s veteran leader L K Advani had raised doubts about the security features of EVMs after the BJP lost the polls.
After hearing Dr Subramanian Swamy’s petition in October 2013, the Apex court ruled that the Commission would use voter verified paper audit trail (VVPATs) linked to EVMs by 2019. Under this system once the voter presses the button, the candidate’s name is printed on a slip of paper, shown to the voter and dropped in a box below.
It is a secondary step for the voter to double check that he has voted for the right candidate. This method was first used in the Nagaland elections in 2013. The Opposition also slammed the Centre for failing to provide funds to the Commission to put in place sufficient number of VVPAT machines for the 2019 Lok Sabha polls. The Manmohan Singh government gave the first tranche of money for procuring 20 per cent of the machines. But the Narendra Modi government has not released any money for the VVPATs so far. ECI needs Rs. 3174 cr for these machines.
The Commission has challenged political parties or any one else to prove that the EVMs can be tampered with. But the political parties are not buying it. It is for the Election Commission to prove its case to the satisfaction of the political parties and the people, and remove the perception that machines can be tampered with. Until then the debate may go on.