Devangshu Datta: A vote for the beep

TECHNOBEAT

By today afternoon, the political horse-traders will have concrete numbers to play with and the exit-pollsters will be conducting post-mortems. It will be only a matter of two or three hours from the start of counting to the declaration of results in the 14th Lok Sabha.

To old-timers, the speed of declaration is like a miracle "" earlier, results used to trickle in, round by agonising hand-counted round, over several days. The miracle is courtesy the million or more electronic voting machines (EVM) deployed across 7,00,000 booths in India's first all-tech election. The "sanctity of the electoral process", to use a tired but apposite cliche, depends on the beeping monsters and their modus operandi.

The specifications of EVMs cater to many types of problems. EVMs must be user-friendly for illiterate electorates; they must be hacker-proof as well. They must be robust enough to cope with extremes of climate and altitude. They must handle uncertain power-supply and retain the integrity of record while stored for weeks.

The two PSUs entrusted with the development and manufacture of these units seem to have coped pretty well. India's electoral processes are by no means perfect, but the abuses don't centre on EVMs. Bharat Electronics Limited (BEL, Bangalore) and Electronics Corporation of India Ltd (ECIL, Hyderabad), will not be targets in the blame-game that follows every poll.

The electronics of tamper-proofing is fairly simple. EVMs use microchips with embedded software that cannot be reprogrammed once manufactured. Resetting the machine to tamper with records is impossible without the complicity of manufacturers and the bypassing of quality control tests.

An EVM can record upto 3,840 votes at a maximum speed of five votes per minute. It can be set for upto 64 individual voting symbols. EVMs operate off a 6-volt power-pack. So power outage (or lack of electrification) isn't an issue.

EVMs can handle simultaneous voting for Assembly and Lok Sabha elections. Every vote recorded is valid "" not the case with ballot papers where the percentage of invalid votes can often exceed the victory margin in swing constituencies.

The vote record is written into the hard-drive of the "Control unit", where it is retained indefinitely. The control unit is a wrinkle specifically designed to prevent abuse. This remains in the hands of polling officials, who press a switch to release every ballot for the "balloting unit", where voters must press a blue button until it goes "Pwee", as described by the inimitable Laloo Prasad Yadav.

In the event of booth capture, poll officials can press a button labelled "close" on the control unit. This shuts down the EVM, which will refuse to record any more votes. Or the official can exit post-haste with the control unit, which equally effectively locks down the balloting unit. The deliberately measured pace of five votes a minute is also designed to discourage booth-capture.

Expense-wise, the technology is a saver. The first batch of EVMs (control unit plus ballot unit plus battery) was delivered in 1990 for a cost of Rs 5,500 per unit. Costs have increased somewhat since then, but EVMs incur recurring savings in terms of 600 million ballot papers and in terms of time and manpower deployment.

So where's the rub? Units do malfunction but the EC maintains roving backups as well as a reserve stock of ballot papers. The potential problems are slightly outside the realm of technology but they are germane to the democratic process.

EVMs leave an indelible booth-by-booth record of voting patterns, which can lead to vindictive reprisals in charged situations. The Election Commission is devising a "master counting machine" to protect records in sensitive constituencies. Also, EVMs can be overwhelmed by sheer numbers if there are more than 64 candidates in a given constituency.

That's probably the weakest spot in the system. A political party could sign on "independent" candidates to force the EVM out of circulation by dint of sheer number of candidates. After that, it would be back to time-tested methods of booth-and ballot-box capture.