Question

please write a 3 page minimum/two outside citations paper on any facet of EVM you wish to research.

Answer 1

Whether we use electronic voting machines or go back to the good old paper ballot system, the mandate should be that of the public, dismissing the outcries of different political parties on different self-centric agendas
The reactions of the opposition political spectrum to the result of the Uttar Pradesh election have been bizarre. Visibly stung by the magnitude of people’s mandate and left with no major front on which to launch an offensive on the winning party, they finally have shifted the blame on the functioning of electronic voting machines (EVM), adding that these were manipulated.
On this issue the Opposition approached both the Election Commission of India (ECI) and the Supreme Court. Counter-intuitively, they also went in a delegation to the President demanding a rollback to paper ballots. Ironically, the Grand Old Party (GOP) of India, which governed the country for several decades and is credited to have introduced the EVM in 1982 and matured it to complete adoption in a large and complex country like India, which is by no stretch of imagination an easy task, has been playing a lead role in these protests. The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), many would argue, behaved in a very irresponsible manner by accusing the ECI having acted in favour of BJP.
Despite the ECI’s re-assurance that the EVMs could not be tampered with or hacked, these parties are not relenting. In a recent interview, Arvind Kejriwal, the Chief Minister of Delhi, said if the EVM issue was not sorted out, “our democracy won’t survive”. He has renewed his allegations against the EVM even in the just concluded Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) election, which gave a landslide win to the BJP and defeat to the AAP.
It appears a sense of panic has gripped them to make them respond in such an absurd manner. In any case, the recent decision of the Modi Cabinet to provide EVMs with voter-verifiable paper audit trail (VVPAT) by 2019 may bring a closure to this ongoing fiasco. However disgraceful be the ongoing event, it can be used by the country to review the present EVM-based voting system for further reforms.
Technically, there is one limitation of the EVM. It cannot on its own verify the identity of the voter. Therefore, its right use hinges on two factors — the integrity of the election official and adequacy of security arrangement. The first ensures that only genuine voters exercise franchise. The second establishes a physical environment where the voters exercise their ballot and officials observe their responsibilities without fear.
The Assembly and parliamentary elections are conducted by the Central Election Commission (CEC), where both these conditions are generally satisfied. As a result, EVMs reflect the people’s mandate in a free and fair manner. However, the same thing cannot be said about elections for panchayats, municipalities, corporations and other local bodies conducted under the aegis of State Election Commission (SEC). On several occasions the ruling parties in States are suspected to be exercising unethical influence over both the election officials as well as police force, thereby undermining the effectiveness of the EVMs. There have been instances in West Bengal, where elections were marked by threat, intimidation and occasional bloodshed.
Clearly, these are not shortcomings of the EVM but they do expose the vulnerability of the election process. If democracy has to take further root into the country, these are the real issues that need to be addressed instead of casting spurious allegations about tempering of EVMs. The wheels of technology need to be turned ahead towards the next round of reforms solving these process-vulnerabilities rather than attempting retrogression by teturing to paper ballots.
The solution lies in the following: Make it difficult for malicious elements to hijack elections and set up objective mechanisms of establishing voter-identity, and eliminate human intervention in the process. To achieve the first, the process of voting should itself be distributed in time and space. That is to say, one, fixing larger time duration, say a month, for exercising franchise instead of a single day. This makes it impossible for parties to engage resources necessary to rig a process happening over a month; two, increasing the number of ‘booths’ where one can cast his vote, potentially enable each voter to cast a vote in privacy of this residence. To achieve the second, the process should bring into practice a mechanism to objectively establish the identity of the voter.
It is plain to see that online voting answers both the above challenges. It can conveniently spread an election over a month, and at the same time enable a citizen to cast vote through, say a mobile app, in the comfort and security of his residence. Till the time technology penetration still falls short of the last mile, election booths may still be in place with EVMs or may be other electronic devices as tablets that integrate with the same backend as the mobile apps. The last bit of the problem is the possibility of securely establishing identity of the voter, which has already been attacked at an infrastructural level by Aadhaar. This permits the possibility of a biometric authentication which could significantly reduce the human dependency and severely curtail the ability of Governments and parties to pressurise election officials.
Work has begun for making Internet voting a reality. The European Commission launched a cybervote project aimed at setting up ‘fully verifiable on-line elections, guaranteeing absolute privacy of the votes’, and using fixed and mobile Internet terminals, where some countries like Switzerland, Finland, and Estonia have achieved some success. The issue has been engaging attention of countries such as France, Norway, Lithuania and more.
As against the streams of benefits it inhere, Internet-based or online voting system suffers from one serious limitation. This arises out of concerns for data security and data privacy relating to the ballots. For this reason, countries like Germany, France had reverted to traditional paper ballot system from online voting. In more recent times, the emergence of the Blockchain technology (BCT) promises to overcome these concerns. BCT employs distributed ledgers and advanced crypto techniques to ensure the practical impossibility of such systems being hacked or tampered with. Additionally, the flexibility for ‘select’ authorised parties to view the data may also be achieved which can permanently root out ‘rigging’ allegations.
Already, researches are underway on the area of use of BCT in online voting in some parts of the world. Considering the large Information Technology talent pool and the Government’s emphasis on increasing the deployment of technology across all facets of governance, India can achieve rapid progress in actualising this possibility and be the country to lead the world to the next milestone of democracy. The work should begin on this forthwith.