Bringing a few procedural changes in the voting and counting process will help

• On July 17, several Opposition parties decided to discuss the issue of malfunctioning electronic voting machines (EVMs) in the current Monsoon Session of Parliament and place a joint demand to the Election Commission (EC) to use ballot papers in the upcoming Assembly elections and the 2019 Lok Sabha elections.

Some suggestions

Rather than throwing the baby out with the bathwater, a couple of procedural changes will bring in credibility to the voting process.

• The EC has already operationalised the voter-verifiable paper audit trail (VVPAT) with an attached printer that will provide a paper trail for those who have cast their votes. At present, after casting the vote in EVMs, the printed paper is directly dropped in the 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. This was the procedure before the introduction of EVMs.
• 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.

 In a democracy, elections should not only be fair but should be seen to be fair. By shoring up its image and bringing in some more transparent reforms, the EC can restore faith in elections.

Source: The Hindu