The unbeatable box

Just a few days before he led the Aam Aadmi Party to a landslide victory in Delhi, Arvind Kejriwal raised his fears about the tampering of the electronic voting machines (EVM). The fact that 45 of his newly elected MLAs won with a majority of more than 20,000 votes should clear his doubts and also many sceptics who time and again doubt the integrity of these machines that have transformed the conduct of elections in India.

Most of these issues are based on misconceptions that EVMs can be hacked and the memory chips doctored; that software can be programmed so votes only go to a particular candidate; and even that the votes stored can be erased due to erratic power supply or by hacking.

Further, comparisons are made with a few countries that experimented with voting machines by using an operating system and many of these comparisons are to countries that could not optimally introduce the online voting mechanism.

It is pertinent to note that EVMs in India — manufactured only by two public sector undertakings, Bharat Electronics and Electronic Corporation of India — have been well conceived and designed.

Apart from their technical reliability, there are regular procedures and systems put in place by the Election Commission of India (ECI) in the conduct of elections, the last one being the introduction of paper trail in 2014 before Lok Sabha elections.

During the Delhi elections this time, rigorous pre-election test and inspection of each EVMs and mock tests were conducted to the satisfaction of candidates and their agents.

EVMs are stand-alone systems having a control unit connected to a balloting unit. The control unit contains a micro-controller-integrated circuit and a non-volatile memory which stores the polled votes. The former is one-time programmable, and program codes are fused permanently during the manufacturing of the chip. This code cannot be changed even by the manufacturer thereafter.

The memory does not require any battery backup and can store the polled data adequately. If an EVM goes out of order during polls, the votes polled in it will be safely stored in the memory and the replaced EVM will continue to take the votes of the remaining people — who had not cast their votes before.

If a booth is captured, the number of votes that can be polled is only five per minute, as the machine does not allow mass polling — unlike ballot papers that can be stamped in huge numbers.

The control unit is with the polling official and the balloting unit is at the voting centre. Voting can only occur one at a time after the polling official presses the ballot button at his unit.

It is prudent to realise the significant advantages that EVMs have brought into our electoral process. Not only it has eased the voting experience compared with the ballot paper but also brought in a lot of safety and sanctity of the polling system not to forget the huge impact on environment.

Politicians should be more cautious before blaming the machines. While the sanctity of the election process is dear to everyone, the ECI has always welcomed every concern and complaints to approach it and prove that the machines have some discrepancy or is tampered.

Across the globe Indian elections are observed with awe because of the magnitude and fairness with which they are conducted and to a great extent the EVMs are responsible for such a positive change.

The writer is former India head of aerospace and defense company General Dynamics

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