The recent decision by the Supreme Court of India to dismiss the plea by Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR) which was seeking for 100% verification of Voter Verified Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) slips to cross-check votes cast through Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs), is unfortunate to say the least. The Court i believe was caught up in the details so much that it missed the bigger picture; the classic case of not seeing the forest for the trees.

How we got here

EVMs replaced paper ballots in elections across India from 1998 to 2001 to safeguard against electoral fraud. Indeed EVMs did help to reduce fraud and made elections fairer, safer and more competitive. It helped to reduce booth capturing, counting fraud and many other practices. It restored peoples hope for a fair electoral system, which is a must for the proper functioning and health of a democracy.

But trust in the system is beginning to change. Why? The constant and repeated calls by political parties, mostly opposition; both at Union and State level against the EVMs, wherein they accuse malpractices due to EVMs for their electoral misfortunes. This is most unfortunate and also quite understandable. Why? EVMs are a black box to the outside world. Nobody knows what happens inside an EVM, bar a selected few. Security through obscurity is the mantra. There are also a lot of ceremony surrounding the EVMs. A lot of paper work and months of planning is warranted, because only these ceremonies ensure that EVMs are not tampered with. There is nothing to verify against.

Against this backdrop was Voter Verified Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) introduced. VVPAT is a paper that prints out to whom the voter casts his/her vote. It will print out the name and the symbol associated with the candidate or party, among other things. The crucial bit is that this paper slip is only visible to the voter for only a few seconds and is then fallen in to a container which will get sealed at the end of polling. If a voter finds that his/her vote is incorrectly recorded, he/she may raise a complaint then and there and sign an affidavit stating as such. This system was introduces to regain EVMs losing trust and make sure that an average voter can say with confidence that his/her vote was recorded by the machine as intended.

But there was a significant problem with the VVPAT system. Sure, it shows a paper to the voter where one can verify to whom he/she casts the vote to, but there is no way to make sure that what the EVM recorded in its digital memory and what was shown to the voter in VVPAT is the same. So a system was designed wherein Election Commission of India will randomly select 5% of all polling station in a constituency and cross check whether EVM counts tallies up with VVPAT numbers. This is how our electoral system functions right now.