The ECI, the Supreme Court, the petitioners can all do better

Do you see the ongoing SIR as an exclusionary process? Is it disenfranchising citizens?

See, there is a clear procedure defined in law for ‘intensive revision’. Just adding the word ‘special’ does not confer on the Election Commission of India [ECI] the right to deviate from the process outlined in the law. Citizens can be disenfranchised by exclusion—either through a law or through procedure that demands documents that citizens do not possess.

But the Election Commission has a mandate to ensure that ‘no voter is left behind’. So, if the SIR excludes a large number of citizens because they can’t produce documents the ECI is demanding, it is the ECI that is failing to ensure that no one is left behind.

Should we see the SIR as a way to manipulate election results?

Elections can be manipulated in many ways. ‘Gerrymandering’ in the US is a recent example. Which takes other forms like delimitation of constituencies; demarcation of polling station areas; deployment of biased ground-level officials. Or allowing manipulation of poll campaigns or political funding…

Is it possible that the use of technology is making room for mischievous deletions?

The ECI’s voter database is comprehensive. [Technology] can be used to detect duplicates and remove other anomalies. But the sad truth is that it can also be used to manipulate. Cases such as multiple names with the same photograph; photographs of foreigners in the rolls; or multiple such entries—these can happen only at the central level.

This should be investigated and the guilty punished. There is a provision of keeping a log of persons who add, delete or correct entries in the database. One can always find out who was responsible for making such entries and hold them accountable. Has anyone been held guilty?

Why is the ECI reluctant to share electoral rolls and other data in machine-readable format?

There is no good reason why lists cannot be given in a machine-readable form, and the ECI should solicit the cooperation of political parties in ensuring clean voter rolls. That’s precisely why copies of voter lists are made available to political parties—to enlist their cooperation in creating a clean list. A machine-readable format will be easy to analyse and help improve the list. This will also help research institutions who have been demanding access to ECI data. In the age of AI, it may even be possible to devise ways to crack open protected PDF files.

Can the Supreme Court, hearing challenges to the SIR, call for analyses by the ECI of the exercise conducted in Bihar?

All kinds of reports can be generated from the database that the ECI maintains. The Supreme Court can ask for any report. While Article 324(9) provides for non interference by courts once the election process is under way, the SIR precedes the election; it is a preparatory process, and the Supreme Court could have easily provided clearer guidelines.

The court could also have asked the ECI to provide reasons for deviating from past practice in regard to intensive revisions. It could have asked how a BLO (booth level officer) can be allowed to verify citizenship. It could also have asked which documents the government issues as proof of citizenship. The conduct of elections is a specialised process, and the courts need to take the help of independent experts to deliver justice. However, the petitions filed against the SIR could have been sharper, I believe.

Is it right for the Opposition to demand that the architecture of EVMs be revealed?

Must we return to paper ballots to restore trust in our elections? If EVMs are losing the battle, let transparency be used to defend it. If it doesn’t stand the test, change it. EVMs, it must be said, were a marked improvement on paper ballots. It’ll be counter-productive, I think, to bring back paper ballots. People need to understand that our EVM was unique because the machine did not know which candidate would be connected to which button.

Also, nobody fiddled with these units after the nomination of candidates was complete. The names on the ballot were arranged in alphabetical order, and one didn’t know before the nomination which party’s candidate would appear at which serial number. All that changed with the introduction of the VVPAT, which did away with that simplicity. The Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail has to be told which candidate appears on which button of the Ballot Unit to enable printing of slips; someone can fiddle with the machine at that stage.

While the understanding was that in case of doubt, the VVPAT slips would be counted, this never happened. All VVPAT slips should have been counted, at least for a few elections or whenever there was demand for a recount. This was unfortunately not allowed. Another problem that was noticed was that the vote from the Ballot Unit first goes to the VVPAT, which prints the slip, and then goes to the Control Unit for storage. This is called connection in series.

Since the candidate data was fed in the VVPAT after nomination, it’s possible to manipulate commands so that a slip is printed for one candidate and stored in the name of another candidate. The better course would have been to connect these units in parallel, so that the vote goes from the Ballot Unit to the VVPAT and the Control Unit directly and simultaneously. The new EVM with VVPAT must be proven to be tamperproof.

How can the independence of the ECI be ensured with the government controlling the appointment of election commissioners?

The process of appointing ECs was always opaque. But most appointees improved the electoral process, which is why India’s elections were seen as the gold standard. Reforms were needed for greater transparency in the appointments and the Supreme Court in 2023 did nudge Parliament and the government in that direction and gave guidelines. Unfor tunately, the government went back to the old opaque system. [In these circumstances,] the options are limited.

The law enacted by Parliament is unlikely to change because the present government is not likely to admit that it made a mistake. The present law and procedures do enjoin political parties to depute BLAs during voter-list revisions, deploy polling agents in polling stations and for copies of voter lists to be provided to political parties to help improve these lists. Gram sabhas and ward samitis are expected to read out the list and take action for necessary additions and deletions.

Has this process been abandoned? Has the onus to prevent rigging silently shifted to the political parties and civil society? If the Election Commission of India doesn’t care about its image or is unwilling to work impartially, vigilance at every step may be the only way for now.