Retired IAS and army officer, Mr. MG Devasahayam, appealed before the Election Commission of India to renounce the use of the contentious EVM-based model of voting and reintroduce the age-old postal ballot method to guarantee free and fair elections. Upholding the “postal ballot method” as the “gold standard of electoral democracy,” Mr. Devasahayam elaborated on the shortcomings of the EVM method by pontificating its “lack of transparency” and how it compromised India’s democratic principles.
He said, “EVM/VVPAT voting/counting does not comply with the essential democracy principles that each voter should be able to verify that her vote is cast-as-intended, recorded-as-cast and counted-as-recorded. The system does not allow the voter to verify the slip before the vote is cast. It also does not provide provable guarantees against hacking, tampering and spurious vote injections. Due to the absence of End to End (E2E) verifiability, the present EVM/VVPAT system is not verifiable and therefore is unfit for democratic elections. Hence postal ballot is any day a gold standard for electoral democracy.”
Another retired IAS officer, Mr. TR Raghunandan, expressed his contempt against the widespread use of EVMs in Indian elections. He said, “With EVMs, no randomization happens, posing a threat to the secrecy of the voters. This way it not only jeopardizes the identity and gives political leaders to capture booth wise trends, but it also prompts the leaders to teach a lesson by cutting off developmental works to voters from a polling booth who did not vote for them.”
