THERE is an unusual stakeholder in the ongoing Indian elections — the electronic voting machine. The last batch of Indian voters will press buttons of their choice on this machine this evening, concluding the seventh and last phase of voting. This will be the fifth general election in India held solely through EVMs. But never before has the potential for its manipulation been so vehemently debated and feared. It can be partly attributed to the Modi government’s ruthless use of state institutions to further its political games. The Election Commission of India (ECI), which otherwise has an enviable reputation, was no exception this time.

Controversies regarding ECI appointments began a year before the elections. The Indian constitution empowers the government to appoint a chief and as many election commissioners as it wants. A law later fixed the number of commissioners at two and the practice continued for decades without being challenged. But in recent times, parties have found it risky to trust Modi for the job and approached India’s supreme court. The court decided in March 2023 that until parliament enacted a specific law, a three-member committee comprising the prime minister, leader of the opposition and the chief justice would select the commission members.

The Modi government, however, enacted a law in December 2023 replacing the chief justice with a union minister chosen by the prime minister. This effectively meant that power remained with the sitting government. Incidentally, one commissioner retired in February 2024 and the other in March under dubious circumstances. The government quickly exercised its new powers and filled the two vacancies a month before the elections. The chief election commissioner has already been facing criticism on various matters, especially his defence of the right to privacy of donors of political parties under the controversial electoral bonds scheme introduced by the Modi government but quashed by the supreme court.

It is, however, not just the lack of trust in the commission that is making parties nervous about EVMs. The machine itself raises hard questions. The ECI took around 25 years to ‘perfect’ the machine before abandoning the paper ballot in 2004. Around the same time, a number of other countries were attracted by these machines and tried them. Germany’s highest court threw a spanner in the works in 2009 by ruling in favour of a complaint, which had pointed out that EVMs require voters to have blind faith in technology as by pushing a button in the machine, they could not be sure if their vote had gone to the intended candidate, in contrast to marking/ stamping the paper ballot. Germany abandoned the machine and stuck to the paper ballot.

India’s ‘Voter Verified Paper Audit Trail’ has thrown up more questions than it has answered.

Indian machine enthusiasts, however, worked out a way to get around this weakness, introducing the ‘Voter Verified Paper Audit Trail’. This required the insertion of a third machine, the VVPAT unit, between the earlier two, namely the ballot unit on which voters push the button of their choice and the control unit in which the votes are recorded. When a voter pushes a button, the VVPAT is instructed to print a chit with the name and symbol of his/her chosen candidate. The chit remains visible to the voter for seven seconds through a glass window after which it drops into a concealed compartment. India used this three-unit machine on a trial basis in 2014 and adopted it for the entire general election in 2019.

The VVPAT, however, has thrown up more questions than it has answered. Yes, the voter can now see which candidate he/she has voted for, but no one can be sure if the VVPAT unit has correctly conveyed the same to the control/storage unit. The names and symbols of candidates are uploaded to VVPAT units, after nominations and allotment of symbols have been finalised, by attaching an external device, mostly a laptop, to the unit. This increases the chances of EVMs’ exposure to malware, besides making them vulnerable to manipulation by hackers, national or foreign. The earlier two-unit machine had no port for external devices. More importantly, it was candidate-agnostic as it recognised and recorded candidates only as a number. But after the VVPAT’s addition, EVMs know which number stands for which candidate, making potential manipulation more targeted.

On counting day, paper chits stored in five VVPAT machines randomly selected from amongst all used in a constituency segment are manually counted too, but the rules provide no satisfactory solution in case such counts do not tally with machine counts. Parties and experts have been demanding the hand counting of chits from all VVPATs but the ECI has refused to oblige, probably because higher incidences of mismatches between hand and machine counting will make the whole system more controversial.

After voting ends, the machines are stored in strong rooms until counting day, which may be weeks away. Parties have been apprehensive about EVMs’ security during the storage period. If, however, the ECI publishes the turnout details at the end of each voting phase, parties can tally it with the total votes polled by all candidates as revealed on counting day. This can ensure, to a large extent, that the machines have not been tampered with during the storage period.

The ECI launched an app in 2019, which provided two-hourly updates on the turnout in real numbers, but during the current elections, it issued the turnout only in percentage terms, until a party knocked on the supreme court’s door. Though the court refrained from issuing directives, the ECI decided to publish the turnout details in real numbers. The details of the first five phases have thus been published 36 days after the start of polling. However, this belated action may not be sufficient to counter all conspiracy theories regarding EVM manipulation during the storage period.

On June 4, all EVMs will be brought from the strong rooms to counting centres, and their seals will be broken to push the result buttons. Besides the next government, these results will decide if the EVMs have survived the hardest endurance test of their lives. It will influence the raging international debate on replacing the paper ballot with machines.

The writer heads the media platform loksujag.com.

Published in Dawn, June 1st, 2024