Concerns Over EVMs Transparency: Here's What Lok Sabha Election Experts Have To Say
ABP NewsIndia’s Electronic Voting Machines are once again the center of contentious debate ahead of the upcoming national polls with opposition parties staging nationwide protests alleging that the machines can be tampered with to manipulate election results. Similar calls were made in the last general elections when various parties demanded a return to paper ballots or to improve the present Voter-Verified Paper Audit Trail EVM system — a printed paper slip containing the symbol of the candidate for whom a vote has been cast that is visible to the voter for seven seconds before dropping into a sealed box. Demand For End-To-End Verifiability Primarily, there are concerns about how not all VVPAT slips are voter-verified since the Election Commission of India only counts them under certain conditions — when there is no display of the result on the Control Unit, or at five randomly selected polling stations of each assembly constituency, as mandated by India’s Supreme Court. In response to a petition filed by non-profit watchdog Association for Democratic Reforms seeking 100 percent counting of VVPAT slips, the ECI had said in the apex court that if it were to count all of the slips in every election then it would tantamount to the re-introduction of paper ballots by indirect means. Like last year during the Karnataka assembly elections, when a mob toppled an officer's car under the false impression a BJP MLA was involved in taking the machine before voting closed to rig results.