Congress can’t give up on EVM battle now

Congress leaders Rahul Gandhi and Sonia Gandhi during a Vijayadashami celebration at the Red Fort ground in New Delhi on October 12. Pic/PTI

It is hard to imagine the Election Commission of India upholding the Congress's complaint that electronic voting machines were manipulated in the Haryana Assembly election. In such a scenario, the grand old party will have three options: One, take recourse to the dilatory process of petitioning the judiciary for redressing its grievances. Two, mobilise the public for altering the electronic voting system to quell doubts that it can be gamed. Three, apologise for eroding the nation's faith in the EVM.

For the Congress not to exercise any of the three options, particularly the last two, would mean its participation in future elections would legitimise the voting system in which it has little faith. It would, at worst, be an example of amoral politics and, at best, epitomise the party's incapacity to fight for causes it
considers worthy.

But first, the Congress's allegation. It claimed some of the EVMs used for counting in Haryana had their batteries charged up to 99 per cent. These apparently reported overwhelmingly high vote counts for the BJP. Those EVMs with their batteries charged 70 per cent or less yielded votes favouring the Congress.

This is not the first instance of a controversy erupting over EVM batteries. In December 2023, after the Congress was trumped in Madhya Pradesh in the Assembly election there, its leader Kamal Nath claimed that as many as 100 EVMs were found charged up to 99 per cent at the time of counting. "How can the machines be charged 99 per cent if they have been used for voting for 10 hours?" Nath asked incredulously, adding that most votes from those 100 EVMs went to the BJP.

The battery puzzle in Madhya Pradesh was not solved. It is unlikely the battery conundrum in Haryana will be resolved, either, for the ECI has, in the past, demonstrated a proclivity to either stonewall queries about the EVM or provide explanations few find convincing. The judiciary's past, too, shows it accepts the ECI's arguments about the impregnability of the EVM to manipulation.

Yet, ironically, millions of citizens will not take amiss the Congress upping the ante over the EVM, for the suspicion regarding it runs deep in India. Don't believe it? Take the survey the Lokniti-CSDS (Centre for the Study of Developing Societies) conducted before the 2024 Lok Sabha elections. It found that 17 per cent of the people believed the "likelihood" of the ruling party manipulating the EVM was "a lot", and another 28 per cent thought it could "somewhat" do so. In effect, every second voter distrusts the EVM.

In my March 4 column, ‘Is there a jinni in the EVM?', I wrote on the belief in Maharashtra, Bihar, Uttarakhand and Delhi that the EVM can be rigged. Journalist Supriya Sharma travelled in west Uttar Pradesh before this year's national elections, and reported on the incredible scale of voters' misgivings about the EVM.

There is also the issue of data: In the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, as many as 373 constituencies reported a mismatch between the votes polled and votes counted. In its analysis of the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, the Association for Democratic Reforms showed that in 363 parliamentary constituencies, votes counted fell short of votes polled by 5.54 lakh. In another 176 constituencies, 35,093 votes were counted in excess of votes polled. The ECI hasn't satisfactorily explained these data discrepancies.

But such details have failed to persuade the Supreme Court to order the ECI for assailing the doubts regarding the EVM. In April, in fact, the Supreme Court rejected pleas demanding a return to the ballot paper for voting, printing the Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) slips for voters to verify and drop these in ballot boxes for counting, and matching 100 per cent of VVPAT slips with EVM counts. The Supreme Court is convinced that the electronic voting system is technologically firewalled against manipulation.

The Supreme Court, however, glosses over the fundamental question: Why do citizens have reservations about the EVM? The answer lies in its opacity. Citizens wonder whether votes cast through the EVM are registered as cast, and counted as registered. What happens inside the EVM is invisible to them, unlike in voting by ballot paper, which voters would stamp and drop in a box. There was no possibility of ballots being switched from one party to another inside the box, which could, though, be looted or stuffed. But this process was visible, was often reported in the media, and led to the ordering of repolls. With the ubiquity of smartphones and CCTV cameras today, it would be improbable for such electoral malpractices to go undetected.

It is a mistake to endlessly debate whether the EVM can be manipulated, for it is only democratic to abandon the system of voting in which the people's confidence is low. Or to, at least, alter it for assuring the people that their votes cannot be stolen - by counting all VVPAT slips in every constituency, for instance. Indeed, the Congress's legitimacy will erode in case it now retreats from fighting the battle over the EVM it has heralded by rejecting the Haryana election verdict.

The writer is a senior journalist and author of Bhima Koregaon: Challenging Caste

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