Insisting that the electronic voting machines were not to be trusted, opposition parties on Sunday petitioned the Election Commission, demanding that in the coming Lok Sabha elections, at least 50 per cent of the EVMs be subjected to verification against their paper trails.
“It is imperative that the EC should ensure that sample, physical counter check of the paper trail and matching it with the electronic vote should happen mandatorily in all, if not in at least 50 per cent of all EVMs,” said the petition, signed by as many as 22 parties and handed over to the commission.
The opposition parties asked why the commission had limited the sample check of VVPATs to just 2.5 per cent of the machines.
The opposition has been demanding a reversal to paper balloting in the wake of doubts being expressed that EVMs were not immune to efforts to manipulate them. They are now demanding VVPAT verification of 50 per cent of the EVMs since there is not enough time left before the Lok Sabha elections to arrange for paper ballot.
It was also demanded that after counting from EVM, if it is found that the difference of votes cast in favour of the winning candidate and that cast in favour of the second position securing candidate is less than five per cent of votes, mandatory counting of paper trail from VVPAT be carried out in each polling station of that constituency. And if there is a difference in counting of votes between EVM and VVPAT, then the result in counting from VVPAT should prevail.
“Every vote is equally important and every vote must be counted as cast. Unfortunately, developments in the recent past suggest that the most important aspect of our representative democracy, i.e. holding free and fair elections, has come under a serious cloud. Electronic voting machines (EVMs) have emerged as a major cause of concern in the country,” the opposition parties stated in the petition.
They cited reports of mismatch between votes polled and votes counted in Madhya Pradesh and Telangana. In addition, they said, there were instances of EVMs and strong-rooms becoming vulnerable to attacks and manipulations as also incidents of power outages, failure of CCTV cameras at the strong-rooms, and detection of signals of wireless or mobile networks of a particular telecom operator in the vicinity of polling centres and strong-rooms.
The petition also referred to reports of “pre-programmed EVMs” transferring all the votes to a particular party which is in power at the Centre, irrespective of which button was pressed.
“All these suspicious activities/incidents raise serious doubts about the credibility of EVMs and the purity of the entire electoral process,” the petition stated, adding that the insistence of the EC on the use of EVMs is not adding to the credibility of the process. The hackathon offered by EC, it said, remained a non-starter since no one was allowed to even come near the machine.
“Ideally, the ECI should have started the process of reverting to physical paper balloting well before the 2019 elections to enable it to implement such paper balloting in these forthcoming elections. Unfortunately, it is too late to expect such a reversion to pallot balloting,” the opposition said.
The commission has time and again assured that the EVMs cannot be manipulated or tampered with. It has also rejected the idea of going back to ballot paper, saying it would be a highly regressive step.
