EVMs TO HAVE PAPER TRAIL IN 2019: EC

Chief Election Commissioner Nasim Zaidi said Tuesday polling in the 2019 General Election will be through paper trail-based electronic voting machines to “enhance transparency.”

He added that Internet voting was not on the EC’s agenda for now, though it will use information and communications technology (IT) in a big way to reach voters.

“We have reached a stage where people demand 100 per cent deployment of paper audit trail machines. We have preserved secrecy (in this system) too. By 2019, the whole country will be covered by (such) machines,” Mr Zaidi said.

The paper audit trail machine or Voter Verified Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) was first introduced by the EC in 2013 to enhance transparency in the poll process and increase the electorate’s confidence that their votes go to their desired candidate without any error. Once the votes are cast, the VVPAT-linked EVM immediately takes a printout, which is preserved for later use to tally in case of a dispute in the final result.

Polling in the 2019 general election will be through paper trail-based electronic voting machines to “enhance transparency”, chief election commissioner Nasim Zaidi said on Tuesday.

Mr Zaidi, speaking on the theme of Leveraging Technology for Transparent and Credible Elec

tions, stressed that secrecy of voting will be zealously preserved even in this system.

While the poll watchdog is taking full advantage of ICT for “recommending legislation” on providing an electronic postal ballot facility to overseas Indian voters, the CEC said this confidence cannot be expressed for now in the context of Internet voting owing to security concerns.

For e-postal ballots, Mr Zaidi said a “safe technology” has been developed and is being “validated and tested” at present.

“Employing Internet voting or online voting is not on our horizon now as it requires serious consideration of challenges posed by technology. We have to weigh the perceived and actual benefits versus perceived and actual challenges associated with online voting, security of voting along with encryption and end-to-end verification of voters,” the CEC said.