Even as several thousand protestors assembled at Jantar Mantar in New Delhi on 31 January to demand elections through ballot papers, the Election Commission of India (ECI) amped up its campaign to defend the electronic voting system (EVS).
Four years after questions were raised, the ECI announced on its website that the Control Unit is the ‘master’ and the VVPAT the ‘slave’ in the system. It also sent out an unspecified number of machines to accompany the government’s ‘Viksit Bharat Yatra’ to reassure people that there is nothing wrong with the electronic voting machine (EVM).
EVM vs EVS
The EVM is not a single machine. It is a combination of three machines, namely, the BU (Ballot Unit), the VVPAT (Voter Verified Paper Audit Trail) unit and a CU (Control Unit).
BU is the machine on which voters press the buttons against listed candidates and symbols to register their vote. Since 2019, the EVM has been attached to a VVPAT unit which receives the signal from the BU and prints the symbol voted for. It is visible for seven seconds to enable voters to verify that the intended symbol has been recorded. The signal then travels to the CU, which records the vote for counting.
The ECI’s latest clarification claims that the signal travels from the BU to the CU, which transmits the signal to the VVPAT. Voters, however, have no way of verifying what the CU has recorded. Is it possible for the chip or microprocessor in the CU to transmit one signal to the VVPAT but record a different signal for counting? The voter has no way of knowing.
Can the CU and the VVPAT be programmed in such a way that every third or fifth vote cast is recorded in favour of a particular party? Is it possible to manipulate the CU?
The question of trust
Trust is at the heart of any election. The voter must know their ballot is secret and has been recorded and........