Science behind your vote

 

 EVMs have a special feature to regulate the pace of polls—they will only record a maximum of five votes a minute. Photo: Ramesh Pathania/Mint 

New Delhi: Having elbowed out the ballot paper 17 years ago, the electronic voting machines (EVMs), with their blue buttons and red lights, are set to star once again as general elections loom in April-May.

But while most voters in the world’s largest democracy know that a blue button next to the choice of candidate registers their vote, not many know how an EVM actually works.

The EVM has two units—a balloting unit and a controlling unit. Every balloting unit is connected to a dedicated controlling unit with a five-metre cable. Once the polling officer presses a ‘ballot’ button on the controlling unit, it enables the voter to cast the vote by pressing the blue button on the balloting unit. When a voter presses the blue button on the balloting unit of the EVM next to their preferred candidate’s name, a beep and a tiny red light will signal that the vote has been cast successfully. The vote is then registered with the controlling unit, which will store the vote in its memory for at least ten years. To ensure that one person casts only one vote, the machine auto-locks as soon as the blue button on the balloting unit is pressed.

“The buzzer indicates that the person has voted and then the choice of the voter is registered and saved in the controlling unit,” said K.J. Rao, general secretary at the Foundation for Advanced Management of Election (FAME), a non-governmental organization founded by former chief election commissioners. The EVM is also a way to register political protest—in the assembly elections held in five states in December 2013 voters were given the right to choose “none of the above”, or NOTA, as an option.

The Supreme Court ruled in September 2013 “democracy is all about choice. This choice can be better expressed by giving the voters an opportunity to verbalize themselves unreservedly and by imposing least restrictions on their ability to make such a choice”.

The EVMs also have a special feature to regulate the pace of polls—they will only record a maximum of five votes a minute. “This also reduces the incidence of booth capturing considerably,” the EC’s website says.

EVMs have cut down the time taken to cast and count votes. “Earlier it used to take days to physically open every slip (ballot paper) and to count every vote. But now it is much faster and money is saved also on employing less people,” added Rao. Earlier the ballot papers from all ballot boxes were mixed together before the counting started. Now the votes are counted for each polling station separately.

There is a button on the controlling unit which displays the results—pressing that button reveals the results instantly, candidate by candidate, on a screen on the EVM.

The EVMs currently in use were manufactured in 1989-90. They were used on an experimental basis for the first time in 16 assembly constituencies in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Delhi in November 1998.

Since the machines run on a 6-volt alkaline battery, they can be used in areas with no electricity connection. The EVMs were designed by the Election Commission, Bharat Electronics Ltd (BEL), Bangalore and Electronics Corp. of India Ltd (ECIL) Hyderabad.

BEL and ECIL now jointly manufacture them. Each EVM is designed to record a maximum of 3,840 votes, but the number of voters in a polling station generally does not exceed 1,500.

As for the number of candidates or options, a single EVM balloting unit has a provision for 16 candidates. However, four balloting units can be attached to each other to take the total number of options to 64 candidates. If the number of candidates in a constituency is more than 64, the EVM is replaced by the old fashioned method of ballot papers.

But Alok Shukla, a deputy election commissioner at the Election Commission, said that no constituency has ever needed to use paper ballot instead of an EVM because of the number of candidates. In any case, “to overcome this problem, we have now ordered new EVMs which can have upto 384 candidates for the voter to choose from”.

S.Y. Quraishi, former chief election commissioner, said using EVMs saves more than 1,80,000 trees every time an election is held. “Eleven thousand metric tonnes of paper was used every time there was an election in the country. But now we save all of that paper,” said Quraishi.

Some experts are not sure EVMs are entirely tamper-proof. Hari K. Prasad, managing director of Hyderabad-based technology firm NetIndia, and two other researchers—Michigan University professor J. Alex Halderman and Holland-based technology activist Rop Gonggrijp —had in 2010 tried to prove that an attacker with brief access to EVMs can tamper with votes and potentially change election outcomes. “Until now, the EVMs have not been subjected to rigorous, independent, public scrutiny,” a website founded by the three researchers claims.

Prasad said that it is not difficult to corrupt these machines. “If corrupt politicians and officers connive, it takes no time for them to take over a polling booth and compromise with the process.’’ However, Quraishi said the EVMs used in India are the “sturdiest and most fool- proof”.

Ramesh Ramanathan, co-founder of the Bangalore-based not-for-profit Janaagraha Centre for Citizenship and Democracy, said that he hadn’t seen anything that suggests tampering of EVMs in his experience of dealing with urban voter rolls and urban systems for the past 11 years. “EVMs have been a robust platform. It has been the spine of the electoral process,” he said.

The last time EVMs were procured in 2009 by the election commission, they cost Rs.10,000 each. Under a Supreme Court-ordered Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) system, a paper slip is printed showing the name and symbol of the candidate, when a voter casts his or her vote. This is aimed at satisfying the voter that his vote has been correctly recorded. Quraishi said that the idea is also to be able to count paper ballots in case of any confusion.

The total number of people eligible to vote at the coming general election is 814.59 million as on 14 February.

 

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