Tally evms’ id nos at voting counting

Tally evms’ id nos at voting counting

The Election Commission has written to state chief electoral officers and manufacturers of electronic voting machines (EVMs), reports this newspaper, to streamline the storage and transport of these key instruments of democracy. “There shall be real-time tracking and monitoring of the movement of EVMs and VVPATs through GPS-enabled mobile app-based GPS tracking used in vehicles,” says the commission. This is welcome. But it will take time to put a GPS chip in every EVM and create the backend for tracking all EVMs in real time to tally their actual location with where they are supposed to be. More immediate measures are called for.

While Indian EVMs are difficult to hack, as these are not networked and every constituency has its own configuration of buttons and corresponding candidates/parties, ruling out any centralising tampering to contrive registration of votes for a particular button whatever button is actually pressed, nothing prevents switching of machines. If an EVM that is used for voting is replaced, at the time of counting, with another one on which the right buttons have been pressed to give a huge lead to a particular candidate, democracy would be subverted, without any hacking of the machine. Spare EVMs are kept in a reserve pool, to replace machines that fail to work, but unless a close watch is kept on these, corrupt officials could get away with the equivalent of the ballot box switching of old.

Every machine must have its own unique number and polling agents must sign off on the ID of the machine used in every booth, and this must tally with the machines counted. This reform, mostly procedural, can be put in place, while the process of GPS-enabling gets underway. A vigilant commission is the key to protecting the integrity of the democratic process.