Dear reader,
Thank you for supporting Frontline. We hope you’re enjoying our newsletters.
Czech-born British playwright and screenwriter Tom Stoppard said it’s not the voting that is democracy, it is the counting.
So when questions are raised about the counting, what comes under question is democracy. But are there really serious questions to be raised on the validity of the counting process in the EVM age?
With the credibility of the EVM being questioned time and again despite the Election Commission (EC) and the Supreme Court shutting the door on the issue and ruling out any reverse journey towards paper ballots, one wonders how the trust deficit associated with the election process will be removed.
Political sparring aside, the Opposition’s doubts over alleged EVM manipulation have never subsided after 2014. The BJP’s hat-trick in Haryana has simply revived those old allegations.
The Congress won far fewer seats in Haryana than was predicted by most exit polls and the general trend of media reports, which gave it a substantial edge over the BJP. The party’s Haryana leader Bhupinder Singh Hooda dubbed the results “surprising”, claiming he had received complaints from many places and that the party had lost several seats by very small margins. The Congress approached the EC, demanding that the EC should match the VVPAT (voter verifiable paper audit trail) slips.
The Congress went on to make nearly two dozen complaints including half a dozen written complaints. It alleged that the BJP won where the EVMs were charged at 99 per cent, whereas wherever machines were charged at 60-70 per cent, the Congress won. How the battery strength might have affected the counting is still an enigma. The Congress is also mulling setting up a fact-finding team to probe the unexpected election loss. The committee will investigate the alleged “discrepancies” noticed in several EVMs during the counting of votes.
Similar doubts had been raised by the Congress after the BJP’s victory in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Chhattisgarh, but the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) leaders asked how the Congress had won Telangana in 2023 and the AAP had won Delhi three times and Punjab once if EVMs were being tampered with.
Upendra Kushwaha, when in the Opposition camp, threatened to “spill the beans” about EVM manipulation but now he is back in the NDA and nobody has heard him raising questions about EVMs.
When the petition by 21 political parties asking for 50 per cent of EVM results to be matched and cross-checked with the VVPAT slips went to the Supreme Court, it rejected the demand.
In 2017, when the Opposition campaign against EVMs reached a high pitch, the EC threw an “open challenge” for anyone to test the infallibility of EVMs. Nobody could conclusively prove anything either way.
In 2009 as well, the EC asked people to demonstrate how any EVM owned by the Commission could be tampered with. The then Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal had dared the EC to give the EVMs to his party for 72 hours and see for itself how the party could “read the code and rewrite it too”.
After the 2017 Uttar Pradesh Assembly election, in which the BJP had defeated the Samajwadi Party-Congress alliance and the Bahujan Samaj Party, the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Personnel, Public Grievances, Law and Justice, then headed by Deputy Leader of Congress Anand Sharma, took up the issue of alleged EVM tampering and summoned officials from the EC and the Ministry of Personnel and Public Grievances. A key recommendation of the panel was that VVPATs should be introduced in all future elections.
A 2021 report by Citizen’s Commission on Elections found that EVMs were not tamper-proof and that due to the absence of end-to-end verifiability, the present EVM/VVPAT system was not fully verifiable.
The jury is still out on the EVM debate, but not many believe that going back to paper ballot is an option India can really consider. People have not forgotten the incidents of booth capturing and ballot paper looting in Hindi belt States like Bihar until T.N. Seshan stepped in as Chief Election Commissioner in the 1990s. Effectively, however, booth capturing stopped only after EVMs entered the election arena.
Perhaps the Congress would do better to take into account how the Bhupinder Singh Hooda versus Kumari Selja power tussle played out. Were there problems with ticket distribution? Did the over-emphasis on Jat leadership alienate other sections? Has its campaign around the Constitution lost its edge?
The grand old party will perhaps stand to benefit more if it focusses on the serious issues its party organisation and election management face. As American psychologist B.F. Skinner once said, “The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do.”
Until the next newsletter reaches you,
Anand Mishra | Political Editor, Frontline
Tell us if you like what you read. And also, what you don’t like! Mail us at frontline@thehindu.co.in
