A QUESTION OVER EVMs
The Election Commission's own admission of the largescale malfunctioning of the electronic voting machines and voter verifiable paper audit trails is shocking, particularly when they were used for just four Lok Sabha and ten Assembly by-elections, putting a question mark on their use in a general election.
The poll body admitted to replacing 96 balloting units and 84 control units and 1,202 VVPATs, attributing it to excessive heat conditions.
A telecom and IT consultant, who provided expert testimony in High Courts on the EVMs before the 2004 Lok Sabha elections, wants the EC to release the circuit specifications of VVPATs as he says the machines used for the elections should be rugged enough to withstand exposure to temperature, rains, dust, etc.
Ravi Sharda Prasad also cited a statement by the public sector Bharat Electronics Limited, one of the two public sector units supplying VVPATs to the EC, saying that all the machines are "rigorously tested to work under varying conditions.
He says as a long-standing supplier to the defence sector, both BEL and Electronic Corporation of India ought to have expertise in manufacturing "rugged" electronics which can withstand extreme heat and cold, humidity, dust as well as shocks.
Ravi wonders if the VVPATs had the ingress protection rating set by an international commission and mandatory for all electronic equipment, including even the mobile phones.
He says there is no reason why VVPATs should not be able to withstand ambient temperatures of 60 degree Celsius, if they had used rugged components with conformal coatings.
He also questioned the EC's claim of heat affecting the machines as he underlined that the VVPATs failed in the morning itself and not during the hotter afternoons to attribute malfunctioning to heating.
The expert lamented that the Election Commission as also BEL and ECIL have not helped to remove the doubts
about the reliability of the EVMs by remaining secretive about their design and testing. He says every engineer knows that there is no such thing as a secure or error-free electronics system or a computer programe that can't be broken into.
He dismissed a Hackathon conducted by the EC two years ago. He says merely observing equipment in operation or by analysing lines of software code, one can't determine conclusively if the equipment or programme actually performs the functions without errors. From merely observing a VVPAT for a few hours, as was done in the case of EVMs, one can't determine if it accurately records the intentions of the voters.
BOTSWANA PROBLEM: Meanwhile, the full Election Commission would meet soon to take a decision on a challenge to the EVMs coming from Botswana which had taken its help to switch over to the electronic voting in its general elections in October next year. Amid a heated political debate there over use of the EVMs imported from India, the opposition Botswana Congress Party (BCP) has moved court against the country's Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) ushering in EVMs to speed up the election process.
A delegation led by IEC election commissioner visited the Nirvachan Sadan, headquarters of EC, with a request to dispatch 4-5 EVMs to Botswana for demonstration and deposition in the court there. The EC is in a bind over the request as any negative outcome in the Botswana can reignite the Opposition's demand to revert back to manual counting of paper votes.