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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | 'Missing' EVMs -Venkitesh Ramakrishnan

'Missing' EVMs -Venkitesh Ramakrishnan

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published Published on May 21, 2019   modified Modified on May 21, 2019
-Frontline.in

An RTI-based public interest petition in the Bombay High Court points out that 20 lakh EVMs that the manufacturers affirm to have delivered are “missing” from the possession of the Election Commission.

Issues relating to the “vulnerability” and “unreliability” of electronic voting machines (EVMs) have come up regularly in the context of the 2019 general election. Complaints filed by opposition parties on specific instances of malfunctioning of EVMs as well as the demand, raised jointly by 21 opposition parties, to match 50 per cent of VVPATs (Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trails) in each Assembly segment of a parliamentary constituency with the EVM results highlighted these issues. The Election Commission of India’s (ECI) response to a large number of these issues has been characterised as ambiguous and specious by political observers, opposition politicians and retired senior civil servants. The ECI’s resistance to the demand to match 50 per cent of VVPATs with the EVM results has come in for severe criticism from all these sections.

Many opposition leaders, including Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu of the Telugu Desam Party and Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal of the Aam Aadmi Party, have even termed some of the responses of the ECI as “arbitrary” and “dubious”. In a joint letter addressed to President Ram Nath Kovind, 66 retired civil servants, including Bala Bhaskar, S.P. Ambrose and Salahuddin Ahmed of the Indian Administrative Service and Vappala Balachandran of the Indian Police Service and former Special Secretary in the Cabinet Secretariat, characterised the ECI’s conduct as “obdurate”. The “reluctance to undertake a proper VVPAT audit when its present sample size fails to detect a ‘defective EVM’ (i.e. a malfunctioning or manipulated EVM) 99% of the time raises serious questions about its [ECI’s] motives”, they said in the letter. They pointed out that the institution was going through a “crisis of credibility”. It seemed as though the ECI was trying to hide something in the EVM matter, said a senior retired ECI official who had worked closely with former Chief Election Commissioners T.N. Seshan and M.S. Gill.

RTI queries

The ECI’s responses to a public interest litigation (PIL) petition on EVMs in the Bombay High Court over the past 13 months are perhaps illustrative of its approach to the issue. The PIL filed on March 27, 2018, by Manoranjan Roy, a right to information (RTI) activist in Mumbai, was about the processes involved in the procurement, storage and deployment of EVMs and VVPATs by the ECI and State Election Commissions (SECs). It sought directions to the ECI, the Maharashtra State Election Commission (MSEC), the Union Home Ministry and two public sector EVM manufacturing companies—Electronics Corporation of India Ltd (ECIL), Hyderabad, and Bharat Electronics Ltd (BEL), Bengaluru—to furnish details regarding the order, supply and delivery of EVMs. The PIL was founded entirely on data collected through the RTI Act.

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Frontline.in, 24 May, 2019, https://frontline.thehindu.com/cover-story/article27056139.ece


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