This piece was first published on The India Cable – a premium newsletter from The Wire & Galileo Ideas – and has been republished here. To subscribe to The India Cable, click here.
The continuing arguments about the electronic voting machine (EVM) and the voter-verified paper audit trail (VVPAT) raise a number of questions.
Basically, the machines are black boxes and what they do cannot be observed or verified, at least by lay-persons. Even professionals would need access to levels of data to be able to detect errors or deviations.
In a nutshell, when a voter presses a key to cast her vote, the EVM adds one vote to a counter that corresponds to the choice made. The verification of a voter’s identity by officials outside the booth and the manual marking of her index finger with indelible ink prevent a second vote in the name of the same voter.
In this process, there is no need to collect, physically sort and count ballot papers, and in principle, the votes cast at a polling station can be ready immediately after the last vote is cast.
So, what’s the problem?
The fear is that some machines could have a malicious program or feature that counts, for instance, every fifth vote cast as a vote for a particular candidate. A feature like this would still record a good number of votes for other candidates, but would assure a given candidate of at least one-fifth of the votes cast.
In many cases, this could assure the victory of a candidate who would otherwise have fallen short.
And the trouble is that the whole thing would be credible and there would be no way to know if this had happened.
And then, additionally, there is no possibility of a ‘recount’.
Also read: As SC Reserves Verdict on VVPAT Counting, Concern on ‘End-to-End Verifiability’ Lingers
A refinement is where the voter can see, for a few seconds on a screen, the name of the candidate for whom she has cast her vote along with their symbol, so that she is assured that the machine did not record her intentions incorrectly.
But that is all it does. It does not assure the voter that the correct counter was augmented, which is what is important.
This, of course, is just one possible way the EVM could produce incorrect numbers. There may be others, which experts could devise, always with the cardinal feature of not being susceptible for ready verification.
A further refinement, the VVPAT, is where the vote cast is also printed out and the paper evidence is preserved. In principle, the paper slips could then be manually sorted and counted, but that would amount to going back to the manual method.
Given public distrust about this kind of black box voting, many countries, at least in Europe, have gone back to manual vote counting.
Senior advocate Prashant Bhushan did emphasise before the Supreme Court that Germany, for example, felt that electronic voting was not reliable. But the court diverted the argument by noting that these countries have small numbers to work with.
This standpoint – that the EVM is convenient – can hardly be taken seriously if it has a flaw that does not allow it to serve the purpose for which it is presented as an instrument.
“Do not try to bring down the system like this,” is a remark that was heard in the court during the hearing. But do we not need to see if the ‘system’ deserves to stay in place? Is it true that the EVM has deficiencies that render it unsuitable for use?
The fact remains that the inner workings of the machine are not available for observers to see and this, of course, is a serious problem.
In the case of other technology – for instance, weights and measures, drugs, industrial reagents, even manufactured products – there are statutory bodies, inspectorates, organisations to notify standards to be attained, etc.
Even in the case of schools and universities, there are watchdog authorities to safeguard the consumer.
But when it comes to the EVM, which is the heart and soul of the electoral process, we have not been informed of any objective and expert supervision of the programming of the machines and then their deployment.
The reason for institutions for standards and inspectorates in respect of different products is that the consumer is not trained in or cannot assure for herself that standards are being met.
In the present case, of the EVM, the technology is one that is mysterious to the best of us. Do we not need to be assured, by an agency of utmost credibility, that the system does faithfully record and count votes?
While the ISI and the Inspector of Weights and Measures take care of the quality of everyday products, it is the quality of the EVM that can safeguard parliament. There is surely a crying need for such an authority – independent of the Election Commission, which the apex court itself last year noted is not structured in a way that frees it from influence by the government.
The case of the manual vote was one that evolved over a century and was simple for all to understand. With computers and electronics, we see daily reports of scams and stratagems that leave banks and the police forces mystified.
Yes, the country is a leader in IT services, but that is largely because we have cheap labour to populate call centres. And even countries with advanced capability have found the EVM deficient.
The Supreme Court discouraged comparisons with countries that have a lower population. Does an ineffective method become acceptable simply because it is used to tackle a larger number of people? The fact that we have more voters in India makes it more difficult to detect malpractice.
This is the reason we need greater assurance that the system is foolproof, rather than making do with what others have found deficient.
The author is a retired civil servant from the Indian Railway Service.
