The Citizens Commission on Elections (CCE) Friday appealed to the Election Commission of India (ECI) to do away with the EVM-based model of conducting elections and to reintroduce the postal ballot method in order to ensure free and fair elections. The citizen group comprising of technocrats, retired IAS officers and academicians is represented by retired IAS officer MG Devasahayam. Addressing the media on the subject of ‘Role of Free and Fair Elections in a Democracy’ on Friday, he said that the ballot paper method is the "gold standard of electoral democracy" while EVMs lack transparency and violate essential "democracy principles". “EVM/VVPAT voting/counting does not comply with the essential democracy principles that each voter should be able to verify that her vote is cast-as-intended, recorded-as-cast and counted-as-recorded. The system does not allow the voter to verify the slip before the vote is cast. It also does not provide provable guarantees against hacking, tampering and spurious vote injections. Due to the absence of End to End (E2E) verifiability, the present EVM/VVPAT system is not verifiable and therefore is unfit for democratic elections. Hence postal ballot is any day a gold standard for electoral democracy,” Devasahayam said. He was one of the signatories part of the Central Information Commission's (CIC) “representation” given to the poll panel raising questions on the credibility of EVMs and voter-verifiable paper audit trail (VVPAT) machines during elections. The convener for CEE's Forum for Electoral Integrity and coordinator also added: “If the USA, which is the oldest democracy and countries like the UK and other developed countries use postal ballots to cast votes, what stops India from following suit?” Advocate Mehmood Pracha, a social activist and an independent candidate for the Rampur Lok Sabha constituency in Uttar Pradesh, was also part of the panel on Friday. He expressed concerns over the gross violation of procedures and safeguards experienced first hand, in relation to commissioning of EVM-VVPAT machines. My step by step struggle to catalog with proof the inherent uncurable faults of #EVM and the collosal failure of @ECISVEEP to implement even it’s own faulty mechanism. Candidates interested in free and fair elections are welcome to study and understand methods to stop electoral… pic.twitter.com/bufVub0Dg8 — Mehmood Pracha (@MehmoodPracha) April 11, 2024 In a letter to the Election Commission of India, Pracha wrote, “.I went to the warehouse of the machines (EVM). Upon my arrival at the warehouse, I witnessed that the seals on the doors of the warehouse were in open condition and the various shutters at the warehouse were simply locked without any proper sealing. The boxes in which the equipment and machines were stored were themselves also not sealed. Further, EVM-VVPAT machines themselves were without any seals or any other apparatus of security and were being loaded into ordinary trucks with open storage.” Meanwhile, the CSDS-Lokniti pre-poll survey released recently also highlights that the level of voter trust in institutions like the EC has declined in comparison to that five years ago. According to the survey, 28 per cent of respondents trust the poll panel to a great extent when compared to 51 per cent in 2019's post-poll survey. Further, 14 per cent of respondents do not have much trust in the EC compared to 7 per cent in 2019. About 56 per cent of the respondents agreed that EVMs can be manipulated by the ruling party. TR Raghunandan, a retired IAS officer who endorsed that EVMs do not account for free and fair elections, speaking to The Indian Express said, “Earlier postal ballots were subject to randomisation and were bundled into 50 bundles after which votes would be counted. This way it ensured complete anonymity and did not allow any scope for political parties and leaders to trace the booth wise trends. However with EVMs, no randomization happens, posing a threat to the secrecy of the voters. This way it not only jeopardizes the identity and gives political leaders to capture both wise trends, it also prompts the leaders to teach a lesson by cutting off developmental works to voters from a polling booth who did not vote for them.” “I believe EVMs are implemented only for the sake of technology and not to serve the purpose of free and fair elections. This is because the amount taken by the EC to announce the results through EVMs is the same as the amount taken when votes are counted through postal ballots (10-12 hours and 22 hours in larger constituencies). Hence, it only shows the inefficiency of such a model," he added.
