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We are told that we do have democracy in India. Democracy means people having power not only to choose and elect their leaders but also to monitor the activities of their leaders. But there is no such democracy in India. Here even the mundane and sundry activities of the people are monitored by the rulers (allegedly using even the ‘Pegasus’) while even the unlawful activities of the rulers are kept away from the knowledge and scrutiny of the public. Even the election process that remained transparent before the introduction of the EVMs has become a doubtful process, now.
The absence of any reply from the Election Commission of India to the issues raised by GVL Narasimha Rao, a senior leader of the BJP from Andhra Pradesh and a sitting member of the Rajya Sabha in his book ‘Democracy at Risk’, has made the entire EVM process suspect. The Election Commission of India is guilty of having given so much room for the public to entertain bonafide doubts about the transparency in the system and the consequent loss of credibility in the election process. As things stand, although people are not empowered to know what happens in the EVM after they cast their votes, the rights of the people to cast their votes remain assured.
Democracy in India is, now, just that much. It ends with the polling booth. There is no assured transparency after the polling booth. Thereafter, it is Bureaucracy and Media-crazy, which are predominantly ‘upper’ caste domains, as on date. These two pillars work, in unison, against real democracy being put into practice in India.
During the last Assembly elections in 2018, “in Madhya Pradesh alone, the number of votes polled did not match the number of votes counted in 204 out of the 230 constituencies. The Election Commission’s (EC) explanation is that the votes counted is the actual number of votes polled — a circular logic that precludes cross-verification.A discrepancy of even one vote between votes polled and votes counted is unacceptable. This is not an unreasonably high standard but one followed by democracies worldwide.” (The Hindu - 22.01.2019 - Article by G.Sampath under the caption ‘Why EVMs must go”). “Prakash Ambedkar, president of Vanchit Bahujan Aghadi in a press meet on Friday alleged there were discrepancies in the number of votes polled and the number that have been declared by the EC across the state” (The Free Press Journal- 08.06.2019). He said, “this discrepancy ranges from a minimum of 106 votes to 1,380 votes. “We expect EC to explain the difference between the polled and the counted votes” (ibid.). “Data put up on the E.C. website (subsequently deleted) revealed that in as many as 371 constituencies there was a huge discrepancy between votes polled and votes counted” (The Frontline - 05.07.2019 - Article by Divya Trivedi titled “In EVM do we trust.)
Electronic Voting machines do not have credibility, worldwide. The Constitutional Court of Germany had, in the year 2009, ruled against the usage of EVMs and that judgment “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……. At present, the EC’s VVPAT auditing is restricted to one randomly chosen polling booth per constituency. In a recent essay, K. Ashok Vardhan Shetty, a former IAS officer, demonstrates that this sample size will fail to detect faulty EVMs 98-99% of the time. He also shows that VVPATs can be an effective deterrent to fraud only on the condition that the detection of even one faulty EVM in a constituency must entail the VVPAT hand- counting of all the EVMs in that constituency. Without this proviso, VVPATs would merely provide the sheen of integrity without its substance” (ibid.).
It was an absolutely unbecoming conduct of the Election Commissioner of India to demonstrate his reluctance to reconcile the VVAPT in all cases where there were requests. That reluctance gives rise to the suspicion about the impartiality of the officers in the Election Commission. It is sad that “….. the sample size prescribed by the ECI for VVPAT Audit is a statistical howler that fails to conform to fundamental sampling principles, leading to very high margins of error which are unacceptable in a democracy. By failing to detect outcome-altering miscounts due to EVM malfunction or fraud, it defeats the very purpose of introducing VVPAT. Spending hundreds of crores of rupees on procurement of VVPAT units makes little sense if their utilisation for audit purposes is reduced to an exercise in tokenism” (Winning Voter Confidence: Fixing India’s Faulty VVPAT-based Audit of EVMs - - The Hindu Centre for Politics and Public Policy - 27.11.2018).
EVM is costlier than the system through ballot papers. The Election Commission of India confesses in its website (Q. No.12 of its FAQ) that it costs Rs. 17000 for one Polling box, i.e., M3 EVM Ballotting unit and Control unit). Yet, the CEC does not want to bid farewell to the EVMs. “Using EVMs in India may have seemed like a good idea when the machines were introduced in the 1980s, but science’s understanding of electronic voting security— and of attacks against it— has progressed dramatically since then, and other technologically advanced countries have adopted and then abandoned EVM-style voting. Now that we better understand what technology can and cannot do, any new solutions to the very real problems election officials face must address the problems, not merely hide them from sight.” . The book of G.V.L Narasimha Rao nails the repeated lies being bandied about by official agencies to perpetrate the electronic voting machines even in the face of a united, strong and principled opposition to their continued use without applying the necessary correctives and safeguards.
An article by Ripima Narzary, in the Psychology and Education Journal of February 2021, under the caption “Democracy at Risk: An Analysis of Electronic Voting Machines Security And Their Impact On Indian Democracy”, says that the “EVMs manufactured in India are weak and exploitative to severe threats, providing extensive protection. Dishonest insiders or other offenders may install malicious devices with physical access to the computers that can alter the election results. Intruders with direct access before polling and counting can randomly adjust voting totals and discover which nominee has been chosen by each elector. These challenges are profoundly ingrained. The architecture of the EVMs in India is solely focused on the physical protection of the devices and the honesty of electoral insiders. The technology hoped that threats on the ballot box and dishonesty would be more complicated in the counting process. Nevertheless, we find that such assaults remain plausible, despite becoming theoretically harder to recognize…. India's EVMs do not provide accountability, so electors and election officials have no cause to ensure the devices function genuine. India needs to reconsider carefully, for creating a healthy and open method of voting that is acceptable to its national principles and specifications…” But instead of making the process transparent by ensuring 100% VVPAT count, wherever demanded, the Election Commission had acted in a ridiculous manner by bringing in Rule 49MA that wanted to prosecute any voter who complained of malfunctioning of the EVM or VVPAT machine if that turned out to be false.
All these facts establish the fact that democratic voting right of the citizen just ends with the polling booth. The transparency in the election process ends with the polling itself. The process of counting is not transparent and we are ordered to believe whatever the bureaucrats say. We are aware of the present state of Indian Bureaucracy and Media-crazy. These two pillars, predominantly controlled by the oppressor class, work in unison, to promote only the Chaturvarna system and protect sectarian interests. Already, internationally India is ridiculed as a nation with “Limited Democracy”. The Reader’s Digest had in its December 2018 issue, published an article by its team of editors, with the caption “India is a 50-50 Democracy”.
No person of the stature of the President of India would try to cheat the polling officials and try to vote for the second time in the same election. Yet, just in order to prove the error-free polling process, the President is also made to have his finger ink-marked. President Abdul Kalam displayed it with legitimate pride. But the CEC does not ensure error-free recording of the polls through EVMs; he wants the people to have faith in the polling officials. The entire election process through EVMs thus depends on the honesty or dishonesty of the officials and not on error free system. Democracies are not to be made dependent on the integrity of individual officials. Yet, the Chief Election Commissioner was not ready to listen to reason. On the other hand, this small-time bureaucrat wanted contempt powers for him like those enjoyed by the courts and brought himself to nationwide ridicule. When Priyanka Gandhi asked how in the 2017 elections in Godhra in Gujarat, the EVM showed 1,78,911 votes while those actually polled were only 1,76,417, the discrepancy of 2,494 was never explained by the CEC.
But he was trying to bully the people. “Amid renewed demands against the use of electronic voting machines (EVMs), Chief Election Commissioner Sunil Arora on Thursday asserted that the Election Commission will not be "intimidated or bullied" into giving up the machines and going back to the era of ballot boxes. He also lamented that EVMs are being used as a "football" and some sections are doing a "motivated slugfest" over their use.” (Economic Times 24.01.2019). He refused to realise that it was his unwillingness to go for VVPAT counting which had made the Election Commission a butt of ridicule and the EVM process a suspicious one. The CEC should be made to realise that he is making the entire election process questionable by his intransigence. But this CEC was talking as if he was the final authority in taking policy decision, while it was in the domain of the legislature. Such bureaucrats pose real threat to democracy.
Hundred years ago, in the 1920s, our ancestors were fighting against the British rulers to secure our democratic birth rights. Now, in the 2020s, we are made to fight against our own rulers to retrieve our birth rights, which have been snatched away, through the EVM, by the more-vicious-oppressors-controlled Indian bureaucracy. EVM is an anathema to a civilised nation claiming to have a functioning democracy. It does have every potential to easily usher in State Terrorism. It should go!
