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Polity & Governance
Mahesh

04/01/24 06:09 AM IST

Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) machine

In News
  • In his letter to Chief Election Commissioner Rajiv Kumar, Jairam Ramesh said INDIA bloc leaders want a meeting with the Election Commission to “discuss and provide suggestions on the use of VVPATs”.
VVPATs
  • When a vote is cast, the Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) machine, which is attached to the ballot unit (BU) of the Electronic Voting Machine (EVM), prints out a slip of paper with the voter’s choice indicated on it.
  • Though it remains behind glass, the printed slip is visible for seven seconds so the voter can see that the vote has been recorded correctly, before it falls into a box underneath.
  • The idea of the VVPAT machine first emerged in 2010, when the EC held a meeting with political parties to discuss the EVM and ways to make the polling process more transparent.
  • After discussing the idea, the EC referred the matter to its Technical Expert Committee.
  • A prototype was prepared by the two PSUs that manufacture EVMs – Bharat Electronics Limited (BEL) and Electronics Corporation of India (ECIL).
  • The Conduct of Elections Rules, 1961 were amended in 2013 to allow for a printer with a drop box to be attached to the EVM.
  • The VVPAT was used for the first time in all 21 polling stations of the Noksen Assembly constituency of Nagaland in 2013, after which the EC decided to introduce VVPATs in a phased manner.
  • From June 2017, 100% of VVPATs began to be used in polls, and the 2019 Lok Sabha elections became the first general election to have 100% of EVMs being attached to VVPATs.
Counting of Slips
  • In February 2018, the EC mandated the counting of VVPAT slips of one randomly selected polling station per Assembly constituency.
  • This was increased to five polling stations per Assembly seat, following a Supreme Court judgment in April 201.
  • The Indian Statistical Institute (ISI) report in March 2019 recommended that a random sample of 479 EVMs be selected for counting of VVPAT slips.
  • “If for each of the selected machines, the EVM count matches with the VVPAT count, then it can be concluded with an extremely high statistical confidence (more than 99.993665752% confidence) that the proportion of defective EVMs is less than 2%.
Arguments in favor of VVPATs
  • The EC told the Supreme Court that verification of VVPATs of five randomly selected polling stations per Assembly seat, with more than 4,000 total Assembly seats in India, translated to 20,600 EVM-VVPAT systems – well above the ISI’s recommendation of 479.
  • In Lok Sabha and Assembly elections so far, the EC said, 38,156 VVPATs have been checked randomly. “Not a single case of transfer of vote meant for candidate ‘A’ to candidate ‘B’ has been detected.
  • Since the introduction of VVPATs in 2017, the EC said it had received 25 complaints (including 17 during the 2019 Lok Sabha polls) out of the 118 crore voters who have cast their votes. It said all these complaints were found to be false.
  • The EC said pressing for 100% verification was a “regressive thought and tantamount to going back to the days of manual voting using ballot system”. It said manual counting of all VVPAT slips would take time and introduce the potential of human error.
Source- Indian Express

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