Daily Dispatch: Are EVMs Tamper-Proof in 2019 General Elections?

The Supreme Court on Tuesday, 7 May, rejected a review plea filed by 21 Opposition parties seeking a direction to increase VVPAT verification from five to at least 50 percent of EVMs during counting of votes in the general elections 2019.

Opposition parties, led by Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu, were demanding 50 percent verification of EVMs using the VVPAT slips.

Earlier, on 8 April, the apex court had directed the Election Commission to increase random matching of VVPAT slips with EVMs in five polling booths per Assembly segment from one booth. Read more here.

What is VVPAT?

Once a citizen has successfully cast his/her vote, he/she can cross-check the voting details through a VVPAT machine kept near the EVM.

Details such as the name of the candidate you have voted for and the election symbol of the party he/she represents are both printed on VVPAT slip, which is made available for 7 seconds for a voter to check, after which it automatically gets submitted in the machine.

In case the details printed on the VVPAT slip do not match with the details of the candidate you have voted for, then you can file a complaint regarding the disparity with the presiding officer present at the polling booth. Read more here.

EC Silent on EVM and VVPAT Vote Count Mismatch in Telangana

The Election Commission of India (EC) is using Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) in polling booths to counter the controversy over the tampering of Electronic Voting Machines (EVM). On the Supreme Court’s order, the EC has been randomly verifying 5 VVPATs per constituency in the Lok Sabha elections.

This was being done to restore voter confidence, but the petitions filed in the Telangana High Court have raised further concerns. The petitions say that during the Telangana Assembly elections in December 2018, the vote count of a few VVPATs did not tally with that of the EVMs. Read more here.