There is this probably apocryphal parable of the seven visually challenged men who ran their hands over the body of an elephant, trying to identify it. Each man grasped a part of its body and the elephant was identified respectively by each of them as ‘leg’, ‘tusk’, ‘trunk’, ‘tail’, etc. The developments in the EVM-VVPAT case in the Supreme Court remind me of this parable. The various participants in this litigation, from the Supreme Court to the lawyers representing the Election Commission of India and the various petitioners, had (and have) their own respective takes on the percentage (or numbers) of VVPATs that must be manually counted to ascertain the accuracy of the EVM count: these range from less than one percent to 2, 10, 50 and 100 percent. In this welter of conflicting numbers, the basic principles of sound statistical sampling have been given a firm burial.
Why is statistical sampling important in this day and age? My friend and former colleague Ashok Vardhan Shetty has stated, in his recent article in the Hindu[i], “to ensure (votes are) “counted as recorded”, we should tally the EVM count with the manual count of VVPAT slips for a statistically significant sample size of EVMs drawn at random from a suitably defined ‘population’ of EVMs.” He further goes on to say “The VVPAT-based audit of EVMs is a typical case of “ lot acceptance sampling ”, a statistical quality control technique widely used in industry and trade. If the number of defectives found in a randomly drawn statistical sample is less than or equal to a specified “ acceptance number ”, the entire lot (or ‘population’) is accepted; otherwise, the entire lot is rejected.” Shetty defines a defective EVM as one where there is a mismatch between the EVM count and the VVPAT count due to EVM malfunction or manipulation. The acceptance number here is a “zero defective EVM”, which means there should not be even a single variation in the two counts for the entire EVM sample. Wherever a variation in the EVM and VVPAT count arises in the chosen sample, the VVPAT count for that population of EVMs should be taken up, with the winner being declared on the basis of the VVPAT count.
The questions that have haunted the EVM-VVPAT issue since the introduction of VVPATs have been twofold: (a) what should be the population of EVMs from which the VVPAT sample should be drawn; (b) what steps should be taken in the event the sample shows a “defective” EVM count. Obviously, going by logic, the entire EVM population from which the sample was drawn should be deemed defective and the VVPAT count for this population should determine the victor of the electoral contest. These two issues were neither raised clearly before the Supreme Court nor did the Supreme Court see fit to decide on these two issues.
VVPAT count of a specific sample of the EVM population makes sense, as the VVPAT acts as a check on EVM accuracy. To ask for 100% VVPAT count is meaningless. The question could then be raised: why have the EVM at all? There is also the issue of the reliability of the VVPAT count. Kannan Gopinathan, a former IAS officer, has, in his article in The India Forum[ii], highlighted the vulnerabilities in the present EVM-VVPAT process. In his view, the jugaad-like manner in which the VVPAT machine has been inserted into India’s electronic voting process has endangered security, rendering the process safeguards that were earlier designed to protect EVMs of little value. In which case, even a manual 100% VVPAT count is no guarantee that the key principle of the election process has been adhered to — namely that votes have been “cast as intended, recorded as cast and counted as recorded.” I am not, in this blog, going into his brilliant analysis but would urge my readers to go through his article (as well as the article of Shetty referred to earlier) to get a complete understanding of why the present arrangement of verification of 5 VVPATs per assembly constituency is flawed and unlikely to meet the requirement of transparency of the voting process. The Election Commission contends that there has been no mismatch between the EVM and VVPAT count in the samples selected in elections from the 2019 Lok Sabha elections to date. In the absence of published figures of the verified votes, we are required to blindly go by the assertion of the Election Commission.
In the context of the above arguments, the alternative proposed by the petitioners before the Supreme Court that 100% VVPAT slips should be counted makes little sense. So where do we go from here? The present arrangement clearly lacks transparency. There is no method to satisfy the voter that her vote has been recorded as cast in the EVM. The seven second window for passive verification of the VVPAT slip is a halfway house: we have to presume that each and every voter has satisfied herself about the correctness of her vote. The penalty for claiming that the VVPAT slip has wrongly recorded her vote, if not vindicated by the test vote, will deter most voters from seeking any further verification.
The solution, as suggested by Shetty in the last paragraph of his 2018 paper[iii], seems to lie in the adoption of machine-readable paper ballots that can be counted rapidly using Optimal Mark Recognition (OMR) technology. Since 1979, when I appeared for the Civil Services Examination, the Union Public Services Commission has gone in for OMR technology to assess the answer sheets of candidates, initially only at the stage of the Prelims Examination and subsequently for the Mains examination as well, to handle the large numbers of candidates who apply. My former service colleagues, the present Chief Election Commissioner and the Election Commissioners, have come through the same marking system, so they should have no objection to a simplified and quicker method of counting votes. The paper ballots on which voters mark their choice will confirm to them that their votes have been recorded as cast and will be counted as recorded. This may be the win-win solution that puts to rest the EVM-VVPAT controversy once and for all. Else, like Sisyphus, we will be plowing our furrow up the hill again and again till eternity.
[i] K. Ashok Vardhan Shetty: The Hindu, Chennai edition (30 April 2024)
[ii] Kannan Gopinathan: The India Forum (13 April 2021)
[iii] K. Ashok Vardhan Shetty: The Hindu Centre for Politics and Public Policy, Policy Watch No. 6 (2018)
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