EVMs may soon come fitted with printers

The Electronic Voting Machines could soon have a small printer to tell you to whom your vote has been cast. Chetan Chauhan reports.

Updated on: Apr 15, 2011, 01:00:46 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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The Electronic Voting Machines (EVM) could soon have a small printer to tell you to whom your vote has been cast.

You will not get the receipt, which would be destroyed by election officers once polling gets over. “The receipt could be traded for money,” was a reason given by a senior commission functionary for giving it to the voter. The printer, likely to be installed in the EVMs, would be similar to the one used to produce credit card receipts.

A high level technical committee of the Election Commission is meeting on Friday to finalise introduction of a small printer in EVMs to introduce verifiable paper trail of votes cast, as demanded by political parties last year.

Political parties, last year, wanted the commission to introduce a verifiable paper trail of the votes cast through EVMs, which the commission accepted. The commission asked a five member technical committee to examine the possibility of introducing this new feature in the EVMs.

The commission officials told Hindustan Times that the committee, comprising of Indian Institute of Technology professors and Information Technology experts, found that the EVMs can be upgraded for introducing this feature.

“We expect them to finalise the technological aspect of up-gradation of the EVMs and submit its recommendation,” a senior commission official said.

The move is aimed at erasing any apprehension about the efficacy of the EVMs, which was raised by senior political leaders, such as L K Advani of BJP, after 2009 general elections. Although individual groups had tried to prove that the EVM can be tampered, the commission has refuted the claims.

A final call will be taken by the full EC once the committee submits its recommendation, EC officials said.

A decision in favour of installing a printer would mean upgrading over 14 lakh EVMs used in elections. And, next time you go to vote in an assembly or a Lok Sabha poll, a printer attached to an EVM could surprise you.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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