Efficacy of electronic voting machines under a cloud

The Congress for the first time questioned the efficacy of the EVMs, claiming these were rigged in favour of the BJP in Gujarat, where the saffron party’s prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi is the chief minister.

Updated on: May 13, 2014, 02:04:52 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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The indigenously developed electronic voting machines (EVMs) have raised the hackles of most parties with allegations of unprecedented, widespread rigging in Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and West Bengal.

The Congress for the first time questioned the efficacy of the EVMs, claiming these were rigged in favour of the BJP in Gujarat, where the saffron party’s prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi is the chief minister.

For its part, the BJP complained that the EVMs were rigged in Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal. “Large-scale rigging is taking place,” Modi said at a rally in West Bengal, after which party leader Arun Jaitley lodged a complaint with the EC.

The machines -- introduced in 1981 -- can be rigged in two ways. One, with the help of poll officers and, two, by tampering the hardware to favour a particular candidate irrespective of the button pressed.

The EC has received complaints from UP, Bihar and Haryana that poll officers helped certain candidates rig votes, which is not possible without precise planning.

After a favourable poll officer is deployed at a booth, the polling agents of rival candidates need to be made to leave before the representatives of the formidable candidate can rig the polls unresisted.

That was the complaint against RJD chief Lalu Prasad’s daughter Misa Yadav, contesting the Patliputra seat. It resulted in the suspension of all officers at a polling station. Similar complaints were lodged by the CPM against Trinamool Congress in West Bengal and the BJP against Samajwadi Party in Uttar Pradesh.

Not ruling out the possibility of rigging in connivance with the poll officers, the election commission found most of the complaints to be untrue and said large-scale rigging was not possible.

But that has not deterred contestants from complaining.”We provided specific evidence but the EC did not act,” Aam Aadmi Party’s candidate from Gurgaon Yogendra Yadav said in his complaint to the commission on Monday.

An EVM has two units: a control unit (with the presiding officer) and the balloting unit (in the voting compartment). That is a safeguard as a vote can be cast only after the officer presses ‘okay’ button in the control unit. “Not more than 120 votes can be cast in an hour as the machine takes time to register a vote,” an official said.

The common refrain among anti-EVM proponents is that most developed countries don’t use electronic devices to capture votes. The US has a mix of paper and electronic ballot, the UK and Germany use paper. Some countries have reverted to paper ballot after EVMs came under a cloud.

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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