EVM challenge a damp squib, what if we go back to ballot paper?
The Election Commission’s (EC) much hyped “EVM Challenge” on Saturday proved to be a storm in a tea cup.
It was doomed to be a non-event after it was clear that the biggest naysayer Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) and whistleblower Mayawati's Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) won’t be participating in the exercise and thus whatever expectancy was there in the air that political parties will turn this event into a hackathon to embarrass the BJP and the Modi government got fizzled out soon.
Forget a hackathon, it didn’t even prove to be a challenge as the only two parties which participated in this – NCP and CPM – appeared only as inquisitive students who were given a demo-cum-tutorial about how electronic voting machines function.
Nonetheless, this non-event succeeded in putting a laser beam focus on the EVMs, an important tool for the upkeep of India's biggest strength and achievement – democracy. After all, India has used EVMs in all elections for the last 16 years. But the dream victory of the BJP and total decimation of the entire Opposition in the recent Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections triggered question marks on the reliability of EVMs.
Mayawati stunned all by openly questioning the reliability of the machines and remarked that they had been tampered with. There had been murmurs about the efficacy of EVMs earlier too, from other parts of the country and a few cases are pending before courts in this context, but it was Mayawati’s outburst that brought the EVMs under the scanner.
Mayawati’s concerns about EVMs found takers among such opposition parties as AAP and Samajwadi Party and other parties like the Congress and the Left Front too demanded that the EC should go back to the old method of voting by ballot paper.
The EC has been on the backfoot on the issue since then, particularly when it has been highlighted that of the 120-odd countries which have electoral democracy just about 25 use EVMs for conducting elections.
The supreme irony is that the countries which manufacture and export EVMs themselves don’t use these for conducting elections. Even the United States, the most powerful democracy in the world, doesn’t use EVMs in all its 50 states and many American states still use ballot papers.
One good thing that has come out of this political churning is that after a lot of pressure from the Opposition, the Modi government has finally allocated Rs 3,000 crore to the EC for arranging VVPATs (Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail) which will be used in the 2019 general elections.
The VVPATs are supposed to make the EVM much more effective, wherein the voter gets a receipt telling him/her which political party he/she just voted for. Such machines should take care of concerns that while a voter has voted for a particular candidate, actually the vote goes to a pre-determined candidate, an allegation which Mayawati had made after the UP results.
In a way, the VVPATs function much like an ATM card. Just as after each transaction a user can get a printed slip of the transaction just made, similarly the VVPATs too will tell the voter who he/she voted for.
So, what is the road ahead? Will VVPATs be the remedy for transparency that the Opposition parties have been looking for? Or will the Opposition still continue to pressure the EC for going back to the ballot paper?
The EC, for its part, has rejected the Opposition demand as a retrograde step and vowed to conduct future elections with the help of VVPATs. I get a feeling that the Opposition chorus against the VVPATs too may gather steam in the near future.
After all, in the recent UP polls VVPATs were used in 20 constituencies and the BJP performed even better in these constituencies!
The Opposition parties have to make up their minds about how they want future elections to be conducted. They can’t remain confused and chaotic naysayers. The EC too needs to take all political parties on board on how to conduct future elections.
If the general consensus emerges for junking EVMs and even VVPATs, then so be it. In a democracy like India, the thumb rule to be respected should be this: majority is authority.