The festival of election is round the corner in Nanded-Waghala Municipal Corporation (NWMC) of Gujarat. Elections are scheduled on 11th of October and results will be declared on 12th of October.
The Election Commission of India(ECI) has decided to use VVPAT(Voter Varifiable Paper Audit Trail) instead of EVMs.The use of VVPAT has made headlines and a topic of debate amongst all.Let's have a look at various aspects of VVPAT.
What is VVPAT?
Voter Varifiable Paper Audit Trail will assure the voters that their vote is casted to the correct candidate by generating a slip which shows the name of the party and it's symbol.
For example if a voter chooses to cast his vote for Congress then VVPAT will generate a slip which will mention the name of the party as Congress and it's symbol.
The slip generated is only for assurance of voter and will not be given to voter for security reasons.It will be displayed for some seconds and then will go to a storage box connected to the VVPAT.VVPAT is nothing but enhanced EVM as you can see in the image above.VVPAT is connected to EVM for its working.
Why not EVMs?
EVM (Electronic Voting Machine) was questioned by some political parties over its reliablity.Mamta Banerjee,Arvind Kejriwal were among the some prominent leaders who questioned reliability after state assembly elections of West Bengal. General Election of 2014 were also questioned over its results by Congress and others.
Election Commission of India(ECI) denied these allegations levelled by political parties.ECI organized a hackathon to challenge all the political parties who were saying that during recent elections EVMs were tampered .Though no party went for hackathon challenge but still to improve the voting process Election Commission has decided to go for VVPAT.
What is Hackathon?
Hackathon was organized by Election Commission.It challenged all the political parties for proving that EVMs can be tampered.
But EC put some restrictions on the event which was held on 3rd of june.
1)From each party only upto three people can come to hack EVM.
2)Time given was only 4 hours to each party.
3)Foreign Experts are barred from election
4)Motherboard circuit can not be altered.
Is VVPAT completely safe and efficient ?
Election Commission argued that EVMs can't be tampered.To support this statement they said that it is not connected to outer world that is internet or any other device.
But any machine closed or open to a network can be tempered with.
What is the guarantee that once VVPAT machine installed it will work correctly?
What do other developed countries do?
USA ,which is far advanced in technology when compared to India and other countries, still uses the age old paper ballot system. As can be observed by the recent presidential elections between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.
Germany also prefers ballot system to EVMs.
Japan make EVMs for us but they don't use for their own voting.They still use paper ballot system.
The reason that these developed countries use this voting system is its reliability.
Ballot system vs EVMs.
1)A lot of paper is used for voting due to which many trees are cut down.
But paper can be recycled unlike e-waste of EVMs and VVPATs.
2)It takes a lot of time to count votes thus delay in voting results.
But unlike EVMs and VVPATs,here trained workers are not needed to count the votes.
In order to operate those machines, first training is given.
3) VVPATs and EVMs are costly to install, VVPAT is more costly than EVM.On the other hand paper ballot system are cost effective.
What should be done?
EVMs has two parts - one is Ballot Unit(BU) and other is Control Unit(CU).In BU votes are polled where as in CU votes are stored.
So before upgrading to more costly VVPAT system of voting,first we should match the results of CU and VVPAT if it matches than we should avoid use of VVPATs else we should go for VVPATs after further testing it under all possible scenarios.
Although ECI is thinking to use VVPATs in upcoming general election of 2019 but only
after the use of VVPAT in NWMC of Gujarat its pros and cons can be further understood.
Very informative
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