EVM not a foolproof system

By Danesh Ahmed The Electronic Voting Machine (EVM) is not foolproof and can be easily manipulated!!! This was the judgment of Supreme Court of India and this judgment was given in 2013 right before the year of 2014 when general elections happened. This ruling raised serious doubts about all the elections that have happened from 2004 general elections (when this machines were implemented for the first time) till today. In Indian democracy, voting day is the only day when poor people feel they have something to offer significantly to the country by exercising their vote and choosing the leader of their choice. What if it turns out that the whole process of voting is being manipulated? It seems unrealistic in the first place but going by the recent media reports, this is a new issue being raised whereby a huge electorate is being taken for a ride by asking them to vote and then the EVM machines being manipulated to do the voter count in such a way that it benefits a certain political party. After the implementation of this system in 2004 there were complaints that this was not a foolproof system and could be manipulated. And the Supreme Court gave its ruling that this system is not foolproof and Election Commission has to install EVPAT (Electronic Voter-verified Paper Audit Trail) which generates a printed receipt to show the voter whether vote cast is counted correctly by the machine or not. There is a drastic difference between booth capturing and EVM manipulation, the former happens at a localized level and is quite visible to the public but the latter can happen on a large scale as it involves programming the device in a certain way which can be done in secrecy at the time of manufacturing and then can be sent to different parts of the country without any visible commotion. In the recently held Maharashtra Municipal Elections and UP elections, serious doubts were raised by some political parties about the authenticity of the machines, in Maharashtra a candidate got zero votes despite voting for himself!!! In Nasik city as per reports, votes received by all the candidates exceeded the total votes polled. As per newspaper reports, tally of total votes polled and tally of votes counted did not match in all the 41 wards!!! This sort of manipulation gives an unfair advantage to big political parties who are so called national parties and have India’s biggest and powerful people backing them. (Including print, social and electronic media). Regional parties (whose voters are semiliterate, illiterate and often at the bottom of the social hierarchy) are the worst-affected. Failure to deliver on promises and failure to uplift the people lying at the bottom of the hierarchy were essentially the two big reasons as to which regional parties were born. These parties might come to a winning position yet lose the elections by such types of scams. This will lead to voters of these parties getting disheartened and ultimately deciding to vote for parties that they see are winning (despite a chance that they might lose). This in turn will lead to the death of regional parties and lessening clout of their leaders, which seems to be the ultimate aim of big parties indulging in such scams. The country will again go back to an era where there were only 2/3 parties, ruled by elite classes, and there was no consistent development and representation for all sections of society. More shocking, however, is the attitude of the Election Commission. The Commission is simply issued a benign statement that machines are foolproof (which is totally in contrast to Supreme Court’s ruling highlighted earlier in the article) forcing the political parties to head towards court. Election Commission has to prove their claims that machines cannot be tampered with and answer the public that why despite Supreme Court’s ruling the EVPAT machines were not installed in all the elections. Another surprising aspect is that EVPAT was implemented in Goa and Punjab elections but not implemented in Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand elections!!!! This question Election Commission has to answer and surprisingly nobody even from major opposition parties is asking this. This is to be noted that in countries like Netherland and Germany, EVMs have already been discontinued because of tampering. They have gone back to ballot papers which seems to be the only tried and tested way of casting vote. Almost all the developed countries in the world have shunned this system of voting. It is essentially the Third World countries, who are still continuing with this system. India is leading from the front on this. The debate of tampering with EVM machines in recently held elections can end only if the data of votes polled is made public in which all the voters are able to see the details of their vote and total number of those votes should match with the total votes polled for each candidate (at the time of declaration of results). Election Commission should make the data public, which will put an end to the questions raised by political parties and their voters. Otherwise there will be a big question mark over independence of this commission and voters will be forced to believe the fact that this Election Commission is as independent as CBI was in the previous regime.