Points judges don’t get about EVM

The Supreme Courtrsquos twomember bench led by Justice Sanjiv Khanna did not take into account the perceptions of three classes of citizens during the arguments over the electronic voting machine EVM last week These three perceptions are of the voter the journalist and the expertIn this column dated March 4 I described the deep distrust voters have of the EVM A fortnight ago journalist Supriya Sharma travelled in west Uttar Pradesh and reported on the incredible scale of votersrsquo misgivings about the EVM Sharma quotes one Saba Khan as saying she would not vote unless the elections are held by ballot paperKhanrsquos stance contradicts the remark Khanna made last weekmdashthe faith of the people in the EVM is reflected in the high voter turnout in elections This remark is specious for I too think the EVM is prone to manipulation but I will certainly cast my voteCitizens doubt the EVM because it is opaque they wonder whether votes have been registered as cast and counted as registered What happens inside the EVM is invisible to them unlike in voting by ballot which voters would stamp and drop in a box There was no possibility of ballots being switched from one party to another inside the box which could though be looted and stuffed But this process was visible was often reported in the media and led to ordering of repollsThe second perception arises from an article by journalist Poonam Agarwal who accessed Election Commission of India data for 373 constituencies with 220 of them counting more votes than polled Five constituencies had a whopping difference of more than 9000 votes It could be speculated that the ECI made public the data before collating complete details But scandalously 153 constituencies counted votes less than polled Where did the votes disappearAn ECI official told the court that Agarwalrsquos story was untrue But she had repeatedly asked the ECI to explain the discrepancies Not only did it stonewall her even the data disappeared from the ECI website It will be a travesty of justice to take the ECI officialrsquos denial at face value In 2017 journalist Dhirendra Jha analysed the voting pattern in the election to Uttar Pradeshrsquos urban bodies The BJP won 14 out of 16 municipal corporations but fared poorly in the elections held for nagar panchayats and nagar palikas EVMs were used only for corporation elections On such coincidences the suspicion about the EVM growsThe Supreme Court in recent years has been palpably disinterested in concerns over EVMs Trinamool leader Mahua Moitra the Association for Democratic Reforms and Common Cause petitioned the apex court for a probe into the discrepancies between votes polled and counted Their petitions were last heard in the Supreme Court in February 2020 The ADRrsquos petition on the EVM in which the judgment was reserved last week was filed in March 2023 its application for urgent hearing was rejected The final arguments were completed days before the first phase of polling making it impossible to bring about changes to the electronic voting systemAgain in 2019 politician Chandrababu Naidu pleaded before the Supreme Court that 50 per cent of EVMs and Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail or VVPAT slips should be matched in each Assembly constituency The ECI submitted it could not augment its infrastructure so close to the elections for undertaking such an exercise Last week was just the occasion for the court to quiz the ECI as to why it has not expanded their infrastructure to speed up counting of VVPAT slipsThe third perception is of Kannan Gopinathan who worked as Very LargeScale Integration design engineer before he joined the IAS he quit the service to participate in social movements He wrote in 2021 an article describing how EVMs became vulnerable to manipulation once these were attached to VVPAT machines in all constituencies in 2019 The EVM was insulated from tampering when it was a standalone machine not connected to the internet or external devices Gopinathan wroteThis scenario changed with the VVPAT machine because now after the last date for withdrawal of candidature laptops are deployed to prepare the VVPAT sheet detailing the names of candidates their sequence on the Ballot Unit and their symbols The VVPAT sheet is uploaded to a Symbol Loading Unitmdashand then to the VVPAT machine Indeed the VVPATrsquos introduction provides a backdoor entry for manipulating the EVM This is facilitated by a design flaw Gopinathan said for it is not the Ballot Unit as in the past but the VVPAT machine that messages the Control Unit about the vote cast Votes are tallied from the Control UnitKhanna asked whether there exists evidence regarding the manipulation of EVMs Gopinathan to me drew an analogymdashsuppose someone tells you the window of your house is broken would you first find out whether a theft has taken place before repairing it We keep our entrance doors shut to protect our house from intruders It pays to be suspicious a point Khanna missed when he twice told ADRrsquos lawyer Prashant Bhushan that he was being ldquoover suspiciousrdquo about the EVMThe writer is a senior journalistSend your feedback to mailbagmiddaycomThe views expressed in this column are the individualrsquos and donrsquot represent those of the paper