Dinesh Kamath's Editorial 'Can EVM ensure free and fair election?' that was published in Newsband

Can EVM ensure free and fair election?

The recent Assembly elections were not devoid of Electronic Voting Machine (EVM) malfunctions. ‘Malfunction’ suggests a technical defect. ‘Tampering’ is manipulation aimed at fraud. There were several reports of misbehaving EVMs. A discrepancy of even one vote between votes polled and votes counted is unacceptable.

Transparency, verifiability, and secrecy are the three pillars of a free and fair election. Any polling method must pass these three tests to claim legitimacy. Paper ballots obviously do. The voting happens in secret, and the counting happens in front of her representative’s eyes.

EVMs, however, fail on all three, as established by a definitive judgment of the German constitutional court in 2009. The court’s ruling forced the country to scrap EVMs and return to paper ballot. Other technologically advanced nations such as the Netherlands and Ireland have also abandoned EVMs.

Hence the Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) was introduced. But VVPATs solve only one-half of the EVMs’ transparency/verifiability problem: the voting part. The third criterion is secrecy. Here too, EVMs disappoint. So, on all three counts — transparency, verifiability and secrecy — EVMs are flawed. VVPATs are not the answer either, given the sheer magnitude of the logistical challenges. The recent track record of EVMs indicates that the number of malfunctions in a national election will be high.

Despite these issues, EVMs continue to enjoy the confidence of the EC, which insists that Indian EVMs, unlike the Western ones, are tamper-proof. It is true that the results come quicker and the process is cheaper with EVMs as compared to paper ballot, but what about the integrity of the election?

The argument made in favour of the EVM is that it eliminates malpractices such as booth-capturing and ballot-box stuffing. But is that true in the age of the smartphone? It is nearly impossible to detect EVM-tampering.

The EC is obliged to provide the people of India a polling process capable of refuting unjustified suspicion. EVMs indeed have to pass the test of credibility.

The problems do exist with the paper boxes as well. Issues of hijacking entire boxes as well as other types of irregularities have been alleged in the past and efforts to corrupt the process will also happen in future.

We should look to adopting technology where possible to strengthen the process as it provides a more effective means to do so. The manual process is easier to manage and more difficult to corrupt in a place like Germany but perhaps not India.

Let us examine how we can bring credibility to the technology-led process by addressing the requirements of transparency, verifiability and secrecy.