Reforms needed in the voting process | Explained

The story so far: The Supreme Court has decided to hear petitions seeking 100% cross-verification of the Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail slips with the vote count as per Electronic Voting Machines. Second, invalid votes that were a bane of paper ballots and also a bone of contention during counting process have been eliminated through EVMs. These include random allocation of EVMs to booths before polls; conduct of a mock poll to display the correctness of EVMs and VVPAT before commencement of the actual poll; and the serial number of EVMs along with total votes polled shared with agents of candidates to verify the same at the time of counting of votes. Further, in order to provide a degree of cover for voters at the booth level, ‘totaliser’ machines can be introduced that would aggregate votes in 15-20 EVMs before revealing the candidate-wise count.