Rebooting India: Realizing a Billion Aspirations (22 page)

In practical terms, the EVM functions like a computer. The machines run on software hardwired into the system as they are manufactured, and any attempt to alter the software by opening up the machine causes it to shut down automatically. An EVM is also meant to be a closed system—think of a computer that’s not linked to the internet or any other network but functions in complete isolation. When it’s time for the machines to be used, officials from different political parties verify that they have been set up correctly and the number of votes counted for each party is zero. After the voting is complete, the machines are sealed and physically transported for storage. During the counting process, the data from each machine is collected and compiled, accounting for every machine that is deployed. The machines can then be reset and are ready for the next round of elections.

The use of EVMs on a countrywide scale has significantly improved the transparency of the electoral process. The voting process and the counting of votes have now become much faster while simultaneously eliminating counting errors due to human fallibility. It has also become difficult to capture booths and cast fake votes. The EVM allows only one vote per voter ID, and no more than five votes can be cast in one minute. Tampering with machines to register fraudulent votes takes much longer and is far more complicated than stuffing ballot boxes, and electoral fraud has dropped in consequence. Thanks to the widespread use of EVMs in state and central elections, expenditure has dropped as well. The initial cost of buying and setting up the machine is offset by the fact that it can be reused multiple times. Consider that an estimated 30–40 per cent of the total cost of an election went towards the printing of paper ballots, an expense that can be entirely done away with a one-time investment in EVMs.
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At present, trying to access the software that powers an EVM will probably land you in jail. But in other parts of the world, technologists are pushing for a model they have termed ‘open source voting’, where every EVM’s software programmes would be made completely visible to the public. While editing the code would still be out of bounds, anyone with sufficient technical knowledge will be able to examine it to make sure that the EVM is registering and counting votes correctly.
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Any discussion of electoral reform is incomplete without the fact that India is one of the few countries in the world to have an established ‘none of the above’ (NOTA) ballot option, through which a voter can reject all candidates standing for election. In 2013, the Supreme Court ruled that this option must be offered during an election, writing in their judgement that this ‘would lead to a systemic change in polls and political parties will be forced to project clean candidates’ and increase voter empowerment.
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In the 2013 assembly elections, NOTA was offered for the first time as a valid choice for voters, and was seen as a valuable option for those who felt that none of the candidates were worthy of their support.

While the financial and operational benefits of EVMs are undeniable, they do come with their own set of concerns, particularly when it comes to data security and tampering. To overcome these issues, the EC has introduced a new system, the Vote Verifier Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT), which gives every voter a paper receipt verifying that their vote was cast correctly; such receipts can be used to check for electoral fraud as well as to audit the results from EVMs.
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Field trials of the paper audit system have been conducted in 2011 as well as in the more recent assembly elections in Nagaland.
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The Supreme Court directed the EC to formally introduce paper audits in a phased manner so that they could be used in the 2014 general election, and field trials included the Bangalore South constituency (from where Nandan contested the elections) as well.
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Another downside of EVMs in India has been that the results from
every machine are disclosed during the counting process. Why is this an issue? Consider that every polling station typically has one EVM which registers about a thousand votes. Providing voting data at this level of detail makes it easy for political parties to track voting patterns in small communities and villages. Unfortunately, politicians use this fact to threaten the electorate with dire consequences if the outcome is not in their favour, diluting the secrecy of the voting process and endangering the freedom which is essential for an unbiased election.

As a result, the EC has developed a device called the ‘totalizer’, which delivers results at the constituency level. All EVMs used in an election, whether it’s for a parliamentary constituency, an assembly constituency or a local body, are plugged into the totalizer, which collates the data and provides a final count for all candidates; it is not possible to obtain booth-level data once the totalizer has been employed. The use of the totalizer thus safeguards the identities of communities and their voting patterns, removing the fear of politically motivated reprisals. The first field trial of the totalizer was carried out on a pilot basis in the 2009 Bhadohi assembly by-poll in Uttar Pradesh.
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With pressure from the Supreme Court, it is likely that the totalizer will become part and parcel of the Indian election process, just like the EVM, protecting the privacy of voters and ensuring that elections remain fair and free.

While stories about dead people lining up to vote might make one wonder whether the elections had somehow gotten bizarrely entangled with an episode of
The Walking Dead
, the reality is far more prosaic—the error-riddled electoral rolls allow for voter fraud to be perpetuated by simply appropriating the name of a dead person who hasn’t been struck off the list. A revision of the voter rolls in New Delhi revealed that over 80,000 deceased individuals were still registered to vote.
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This, despite the existence of procedures to officially delete a registered voter’s name from the rolls after their demise. As in the case of the Haokips, whom we mentioned
at the beginning of the chapter, these errors are exploited to cast fraudulent votes. Often, the names of non-existent individuals are deliberately added to the rolls, and these ‘bogus voters’ are another class of imposters who subvert the electoral process through fake voting. While the number of invalid votes has decreased considerably since the introduction of EVMs, an estimated 85 million names on India’s voter rolls are either duplicates or fakes.
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The opposite problem is also true—plenty of people who are actually eligible to vote find that their names have mysteriously vanished from the rolls. In Pune, residents of eighty-eight apartments in a single housing society found that not one of them had been included in the voter list for the 2014 election.
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And in a delicious irony, the CEC of India, Navin Chawla, almost didn’t vote in the 2009 election because a clerical error meant that he landed up at the wrong polling booth, where his name was not on the voter roll.
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Despite the best efforts of the EC, it is not always smooth sailing for new voters who wish to register. It takes months for the registration process to be completed, in part because the process is split between two organizations—the local municipal body registers voters, but the addition of their names to the final voter roll is the responsibility of the EC’s state office. The lack of coordination between these two organizations means that it is entirely possible for applications to hang in interminable limbo. In Karnataka, as in many other states, the EC, in an attempt to streamline the process, has set up a website that allows for online enrolment. Using the website to enrol as a new voter is a simple and seamless experience—until you get to the end and are unexpectedly informed that you need to go to your local municipal office to have your application verified. You’re now dumped from the digital into the real world, having to go through the tedium of spending hours at the municipal office in an attempt to complete the verification process.

During Nandan’s 2014 Lok Sabha campaign from Bangalore South, many of us went from door to door in the constituency, urging people to register as voters if they hadn’t done so already. Many of our volunteers heard complaints from people who had used the
EC’s website to register but had not received a voter ID. The EC officials could not help, saying it was an administrative issue that only the BBMP, Bangalore’s municipal body, could resolve; the BBMP, in turn, expressed deep scepticism about enrolments done using ‘some website’ which they felt was not properly integrated with their own enrolment platform. The lack of communication between the two bodies left prospective voters in the lurch, unclear about what they were supposed to do next; in many cases, they were unable to vote in the election.

There were many other reasons that people were unable to vote. The most common reason was that after moving to Bengaluru from another city or state, they had applied to have their address updated on the voter rolls, but were still waiting for the change to be made. When urban Indians routinely hop from city to city while changing jobs, when migrants from rural areas pour into our cities to better their prospects, when most public sector jobs are transferable, why are our voter IDs tethered by geography? The wearisome wait for an address to be changed results in legitimate voters being disenfranchised for no fault of theirs.

Many of these errors of inclusion and exclusion are also deliberate. Before every election, it is almost certain that one political party will cry foul, blaming the other for manipulating the voter rolls in their favour. The EC releases voter data before and after every election, and an analysis of the numbers reveals bizarre swings in the voting population—massive fluctuations in the number of voters in a five-year period, where millions of voters mysteriously enter or drop out of voter lists, or apparently move from one state to another.
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The actual trends in population growth and movement come nowhere close to these patterns, suggesting that names are being added and deleted en masse to further political ends. Another example comes from N. Gopalaswami, former CEC of India:

Immediately before the 2006 general elections to the Kerala Assembly, after an analysis on the above lines, the Chief Election Officer of Kerala was able to pick two Assembly constituencies—
one each in Kasargod and Palghat—that showed an abnormal increase in the number of electors. A special check ordered by the Commission, under the supervision of two senior officers, one from Karnataka and the other from Tamil Nadu, revealed large-scale duplication of names in the polling stations on the Kerala side with polling stations in Karnataka and Tamil Nadu respectively. In the Kasargod Assembly constituency, about 5000 duplicate (bogus) voters were deleted. Incidentally, that figure matched the margin of victory in the previous election!
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An entire political economy has sprung up around influencing new voter registrations and the composition of electoral rolls, whether the election is local or national. Voter lists are manipulated because the enrolment officer wants a bribe, or has political affiliations that dictate who he will enrol—for example, by choosing to enrol those who are likely to cast a favourable vote. The same forces come into play when voter rolls are revised for every election. Further, enrolments are the responsibility of the regular administrative machinery, which is already overburdened with routine tasks. The result is a cumbersome and opaque system which offers little recourse to those who need it and appears practically insensible to the needs of the people it is meant to serve.

Despite the electoral reforms that have changed the face of Indian elections and technological advances like EVMs, we believe that there is much to be done, as we learnt from our own experiences on the ground during Nandan’s Lok Sabha campaign. We discuss some of these issues below.

Discussions about electoral reform in India tend to circle around a few hot-button topics. Campaign finances are one, with most of us agreeing that the existing legislation in this area has not been sufficient to curb the financial excesses of political campaigns. Another is whether candidates with criminal records should
be allowed to contest elections and hold office as members of Parliament. These are certainly important areas for any reforms to target, and stories about excessive spending by one candidate, or the criminal antecedents of another, do tend to make the headlines. But as we met and spoke with voters in Bengaluru, and as we toured the polling booths of Bangalore South on election day, we realized that it is equally important to respect and protect the right and the desire of people to participate in elections and elect their leaders. This is the one chance granted to our people to make themselves visible to the state, and to restore the lopsided power balance that exists between the government and the people it serves.

In today’s India, when your bank account and your mobile phone connection can move with you from one city to another, it is only fair to expect that a voter ID should be able to do so as well, allowing you to vote no matter where you completed the registration process and where you live now. By imposing geographical constraints on the ability to vote, we are in effect denying people their fundamental right as citizens of a representative democracy. To address these issues, we propose the creation of a centralized voter management system, explained in further detail in the accompanying diagram.

Voter registration is such a cumbersome process partly because you can only enrol at one designated location—typically in the offices of the local administration, which creates an undue burden on them while also severely restricting the freedom of choice of those wanting to enrol. Compare this to the process of enrolling for Aadhaar, which was carried out by multiple agencies at multiple locations throughout the country. What if you could enrol for a voter ID or update your details—a new address or phone number—not only at the local municipal office, but also at a public sector bank, a petrol pump, a citizen service centre, the post office, or the local railway station?