Being a Senior Citizen I had the opportunity to vote in several Assembly, Parliamentary, Panchayat and Municipal elections. In the earlier years mainly paper ballots were used and in the latter years EVMs were introduced for voting. Until the last election held in April 2019, I had the full faith that the votes I had cast using paper ballots or EVMs would go to the right candidates that I had chosen.
In this Parliamentary election the EVM had an additional machine called VVPAT that would keep track of the vote cast by giving the voter a view of a small printed paper showing the symbol and the name of the candidate to whom he/she had voted. This extra evidence that your vote has gone to the right candidate should have sufficed to assure you that all was well. Also the Election Commission of India came out with the decision that one VVPAT from every constituency would be randomly selected and all the pieces or paper trails would be counted to check that the total votes shown by EVM matched with the paper trails of VVPAT. This number of VVPAT machines has now been increased to five by the Supreme Court in its latest verdict after a case was filed by 21 Opposition Parties before it against ECI, demanding that at least 50% VVPAT machines paper trails should be counted.
Definitely this has not gone well with the opposition parties who feel the voting process still can be rigged or manipulated.
EVM plus VVPAT seems to be a brilliant idea to give full credibility to the use of EVM as flawless machine. Unfortunately the alleged truthfulness of the EVM was challenged by many candidates as well opposition political parties about the possibility of EVMs being prone to manipulation or even hacking like any other electronic gadget in the hands of experts.
Interestingly the ECI was adamant and made a strong case in favour of EVM by issuing press statements about the impossibility of EVMS being tampered or manipulated. Besides they argued that use of EVMS along with VVPATS made the whole polling process ‘transparent’, easy and convenient. But all these assurances did not convince the Opposition Parties, who demanded that India should go back to the old practice of using ballots.
Unfortunately those who remember the elections conducted by using ballot papers, will have memories of unpleasant incidents such as vote rigging or voting booths being captured forcefully and ballot boxes were filled with ballots of a particular candidate. Often with the connivance of Election Officials, candidates were given free run to fill the ballot boxes.
For many the advent of EVMS was a big relief until reports started floating around that EVMs too were prone to malfunction, manipulation and hacking like any other electronic gadget.
Nevertheless ECI in its wisdom strongly denied such possibilities.
In view of such grave accusations against the full-proof performance of EVMs, many voters began feeling apprehensive, with doubts cropping in their minds whether their votes would go to candidates of their choice.
