Two days before the Karnataka Legislative Assembly elections' results were set to come out, the Election Commission of India (ECI) on Thursday (May 11) denied claims of Congress spokesperson Randeep Surjewala, who had said that Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) from South Africa were being used for voting. “We have been informed of this by various sources including the fact all these EVMs have been received directly back from South Africa without going through the process of re-validation and re-verification by the appropriate software/mechanisms by the manufacturer i.e. Electronics Corporation of India,” the Congress leader wrote in his letter, as cited by the EC in its response. The EC said it had “never sent EVMs to South Africa for use in their elections” and that it had never imported EVMs from any country. It added that EVMs are not used in South African elections, which could have been verified from the website of the country’s Election Commission as it mentions the use of paper ballots. It said all EVMs used in the Karnataka elections were new ones from ECI. Are EVMs in India brought in from other countries? The ECI said it had “never sent EVMs to South Africa for use in their elections” and that it had never imported EVMs from any country. On the question of whether foreign technology is used in EVMs, according to the FAQ section of the EC website, “India does not use any EVMs produced abroad. EVMs are produced indigenously by 2 PSUs viz. Bharat Electronics Ltd., Bengaluru and Electronics Corporation of India Ltd., Hyderabad.” The website also says that after the introduction of EVM machines in elections of India, many countries used EVM machines made in India in their elections, like Bhutan, Nepal and Namibia. What parts make up an EVM? EVM has two parts – a ‘control unit’ and a ‘balloting unit’ – connected by a 5-metre cable. The balloting unit is in the voting compartment into which the voter enters to cast the vote by pressing the button against the name and symbol of the candidate of her choice and the control unit is with the EC-appointed polling officer. The control unit has been termed the EVM’s ‘brain’, as the balloting unit is turned on only after the polling officer presses the ‘Ballot’ button on it and the vote is then cast. For the machines, “The Software Programme Code is written in-house, by these two companies, not outsourced, and subjected to security procedures at factory level to maintain the highest levels of integrity. The programme is converted into machine code and only then given to the chip manufacturer abroad because we don’t have the capability of producing semi-conductor microchips within the country.,” the EC website says. The secret source code is only accessible to a few engineers. Engineers who are in the factory do not know about the constituency-wise deployment of the machine. How is the safety of these EVMs maintained? The EC website says there is “very stringent security protocol at manufacturer level regarding security of software.” After manufacturing, EVMs are sent to the State and district to district within a State. “Each ECI-EVM has a serial number and the Election Commission by use of EVM-tracking software can find out from its database which machine is located where”, it adds. It adds that every microchip has an identification number embedded into memory and the producers have their digital signatures on them. Any attempt to replace a microchip is detectable and can make EVM inoperative. Thus, both changing existing programmes or introducing new ones are detectable, making EVMs inoperative. There is a Standard Operating Procedure laid down by ECI to discard EVMs as well. “The process of destruction of EVM & its chip is carried out in the presence of the Chief Electoral Officer of the state or his representatives inside the factory of manufacturers,” the website adds. For more on how EVMs are stored and kept secure, here is our explainer from 2019. EVMs have been criticised by some opposition leaders of late. Why did India shift to these? Current Himachal Pradesh Chief Minister Sukhwinder Sukhu, of the Congress party, questioned the use of the EVMs after the 2018 State Assembly elections when his party lost the elections. Arvind Kejriwal from the AAP, Mayawati of the BSP and Akhilesh Yadav of the SP – have all cast doubts in recent years on how secure the EVMs are. The EC has, time and again, refuted these claims. The idea for EVMs was first floated in 1977 within the Election Commission. It was believed to help save costs, reduce paper usage and act as a safeguard against attempts to rig elections. The practices of booth capturing, where some people would take control of a voting booth based on muscle power, and ballot stuffing, where forged ballot papers favouring one candidate were stuffed into the boxes, were largely eliminated thanks to EVMs. As economists Shamika Ravi, Mudit Kapoor and Sisir Debnath wrote in The Indian Express in 2017, data assessed by them from State Assembly election results between 1976 to 2007 showed “strong evidence that the introduction of EVMs led to a significant decline in electoral fraud.” “Using State Assembly election data, we saw that the introduction of EVMs led to a 3.5 per cent decline in voter turnout,” they said, on account of fake votes being weeded out. They also noticed that the decline was substantially larger in states prone to electoral fraud, where politicians faced serious criminal charges. In 1982-83, an EVM was used for the first time in 50 polling stations of the Parur Assembly Constituency in Kerala. But the Supreme Court suspended its usage in 1984, and only a 1988 amendment to the Representation of the People Act of 1951 led to them being used again from 1989 onwards. By 2001, all State Assembly elections saw EVM usage. In 2004's Lok Sabha election, all 543 constituencies had EVMs.
