Polity

KEY POINTS

Significance of Paper ballot

·         Ballot papers can’t be hacked like EVMs.

·         People can’t complain that our vote gone to other candidates as ballot papers are not virtual.

·         World over, countries are moving to paper ballots.

Problems with Paper ballot

·         Paper ballots are cumbersome and susceptible to manipulation.

·         Transporting them and guarding them is a problem.

·         Ballot boxes can be easily captured.

·         Leads to wastage of paper.

·         Takes longer time to announce poll results.

·         Even in the ballot paper era, there were often bizarre theories alleged that “special ink” was being imported by the government to stamp ballot papers that would favour the Congress.

·         For example, Russian ink theory when Indira Gandhi was Prime Minister.

Significance of EVM

·         Faster results.

·         Cost-effective.

·         Accurate.

·         Easily portable.

·         Reducing the role of people.

·         Saving a lot of paper.

·         Additionally, EVMs’ were designed without any software in them, so that to tamper with them one had to replace the chip.

·         Rigging elections became extremely expensive

·         Drastically reduced the invalid votes.

Problems with EVM

·         Difficult to secure.

·         Entire election can be manipulated with a chip.

·         Open to large scale fraud.

Suggestions to improve EVM

·         At present, after casting the vote in EVMs, the printed paper is directly dropped in the VVPAT box (the voter only has seven seconds to see this).

·         Instead, the paper should be given to the voter who should then drop it in the ballot box.

·         In the current system, to ask for a counting of ballots from the VVPAT, one has to move the courts.

·         Instead, the ECI should introduce a new procedure wherein the manual counting of the printed ballots has to be done before announcing the result if the difference between the winner and the loser is less than, say, 10%, and the loser demands a recount.

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This is very well known issue in India that after every small or big election result the opposition and its allies are continiously alleging that there is alteration with ballot machine or it is being controlled by winning parties to make their desired numbers to win.

     All these things are mere allegations till now as not a single parties who claimed such issues have proven such alterations but all these political allegations or verbal fight against each other raises serious concerns within our society as,

1 People are becoming more skeptical about election process.

2 world is looking India as in stage of democratic failure.

3 Our younger generation may refrain themselves from voting as due to these serious allegations.

To tackle all these challanges many experts an political parties are in view to conduct elections on ballot paper to maintain authentic election results but i dont think this is the solution for wide spread allegations of election result tempering issue cause ELECTION COMMISSION OF INDIA has taken a very pragmatic approach that they have made it mandatory to use VV PAT MACHINES along with ballot machines to maintain authentic results as it provides view to voter about his vote given to a candidate and all these process save lots of times as well as there are no chance to temper with results ,but in the case of BALLOT PAPER it is very expensive to print a huge number of paper as well as it is not eco friendly due to use of paper and it will take large number of people in counting work which is not viable in current scenario as most of them are government servants so all the others works will get halted for certain period which will slow down the developmental activities in certain areas and due to use of the Paper ballot there are high chances of tempering as people will get involved in physical counting which have a great risk of alteration in comparison of software based counting where no one can change the numbers as in case of allegation officials can check and match the results of ballot machine and vvpat paper slips,so there is no need to go to past era of ballot paper cause we have very good mechanism to deal with allegations.

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