From Paper Ballots Then to EVMs & NOTA Now, Learn All About How India Votes in #ClassesWithNews18

Himachal Pradesh has already voted and Gujarat will vote in Assembly elections in  December. Thousands of voters will troop to polling booth to vote for their preferred candidate, or None of the Above option, on EVMs. But EVMs are fairly recent introduction to the way polling is conducted when compared to the vast history of electoral democracies.

Ballot papers were the predecessors of EVMs, usually a piece of paper or a small ball used in secret voting. The word ballot is derived from the Italian word ‘ballotta’, which means a small ball used in voting or a secret vote taken by ballots in the city of Venice, Italy. It is a printed form upon which voters mark their choices in an election. The choices are then tabulated and the ballot paper is stored for review should the election results be questioned. It was originally a small ball used to record decisions made by voters. Each voter uses one ballot, and ballots are not shared.

During the simplest elections, a ballot is barely a simple scrap of paper in which the name of the respective candidate is written by each voter. But during governmental elections, the use of pre-printed ballots is a must for protecting the secrecy of the votes. The voter casts their ballot in a box at a polling station. Let us understand the history of ballot papers, India’s shift to EVMs and VVPATs for voting, and the introduction of NOTA in Indian elections:

Paper Ballots

During historical times in India, say around 920, it is said that palm leaves were used for village assembly elections in the state of Tamil Nadu. Palm leaves used to carry candidates’ names, which would be placed after voting inside a mud pot for counting. This was called Kudavolai system.

Prior to the introduction of electronic voting, India used paper ballots and manual counting till the 1990s. Paper ballots were widely criticised because of fraudulent voting and booth capturing, where party loyalists captured booths and stuffed counting boxes with pre-filled fake ballots. The printed paper ballots were also more expensive, requiring substantial post-voting resources to count hundreds of millions of individual ballots.

EVMs

Electronic voting is the standard means of conducting elections using Electronic Voting Machines, or “EVMs”, in India. The use of EVMs and electronic voting was developed and tested by the state-owned Electronics Corporation of India and Bharat Electronics in the 1990s. They were introduced in Indian elections between 1998 and 2001, in a phased manner.

EVMs were first used in 1982 in the by-election to North Paravur Assembly constituency in Kerala for a limited number of polling stations. Later, EVMs were used on an experimental basis in selected constituencies of Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Delhi. In 1999, EVMs were used for the first time in an entire state, for Goa. In 2003, all by-elections and state elections were held using EVMs. Encouraged by this, the Election Commission decided to use only EVMs for Lok Sabha elections in 2004.

Embedded EVM features such as “electronically limiting the rate of casting votes to five per minute”, a security “lock-close” feature, an electronic database of “voting signatures and thumb impressions” to confirm the identity of the voter, conducting elections in phases over several weeks while deploying extensive security personnel at each booth have helped reduce electoral fraud and abuse, eliminating booth capturing and creating more competitive and fairer elections.

Indian EVMs are stand-alone machines built with once-write, read-only memory. The EVMs are produced with secure manufacturing practices, and by design, are self-contained, battery-powered, and lack any networking capability. They do not have any wireless or wired internet components and interfaces.

What is VVPAT?

The Supreme Court of India in 2011 directed the Election Commission to include a paper trail as well to help confirm the reliable operation of EVMs. The Election Commission developed EVMs with a voter-verified paper audit trail (VVPAT) system between 2012 and 2013. The system was tried on a pilot basis in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections.  In 2014, VVPATs were operational in eight constituencies, including Lucknow, Gandhinagar, Bangalore South, Chennai Central, Jadavpur, Raipur, Patna Sahib, and Mizoram.

EVMs and accompanying VVPATs are now used in every assembly and general election in India and a small percentage of the VVPATs are verified.