Electronic Voting Machines: Can They Be Fully Reliable?

Electronic Voting Machine is a programmable electronic gadget that can be used for casting votes in any democratic process of electing representatives by majority votes.

Now the question is whether the use of this machine is fully reliable without any risk of manipulations by vested interests?

The straight forward answer is a simple 'No'.

That is because of the inherent design feature of any electronic gadget that is essentially programmable.

Conducting elections for democratically deciding the elected representatives who would eventually form the government is not a simple process for any nation. 

The process becomes very complex and expensive for countries like India with large population and several other constraints. India, like most other nations, had been using the paper ballot system for almost all elections prior to 2014. But as an experiment, it had used the electronic voting system for the first time in 1982. 

Interested readers may click this hyperlink to read the Wikipedia article on the Electronic Voting in India.

A few other nations too tried using electronic voting system. But most of them have either abandoned the system or limited its use because of the serious unreliability issues observed.

Now only very few countries use EVMs fully for their general elections. Some countries use them selectively while many have totally withdrawn or even banned electronic voting. 

You may use this link to see the Wikipedia article on the status of electronic voting in various countries! 

In India, however, the EVMs have been now used for all general elections even when there are rising apprehensions about its reliability and potential for manipulations by independent assessors! 

Interested readers may visit this page for one such study report.

The machines used in India are manufactured by central public sector companies such as Indian Telephone Industries Limited and the Electronic Corporation of India Limited. They are reportedly fully designed indigenously without any foreign technology back up. The Election Commission of India and the Government of India, maintain that these machines are highly reliable.

But at least a section of the people of India and several political parties have been  expressing their apprehensions. 

There are several opinions for and against the electronic voting system as being adopted in India now.

Here is one that tells about the apprehensions. (Click the hyperlink to read)

This is another newspaper report some time ago.

And there are several in support as well that one can search and find in the internet like this one.

But as an individual voter in India, I feel that a system that is felt as non reliable by at least a minor section of the people, should not be used, as elections to elect peoples' representatives to form governments in a democratic system should be above doubts.

Some may argue that all governmental actions are debatable and get support as well as opposition. That may be right. But the Election Commission is constitutionally maintained outside the purview of government as a constitutionally safeguarded independent authority because it needs to be above doubts!

The basic question to be answered is why most of the advanced nations are not using electronic voting system for general elections even now. Why several nations have banned it? Why several nations have reverted back to paper ballots? Is India so superior in electronic information technology to device electronic voting machines that are independent of human interventions in between the voting process?

No convincing answers from any source other than assertions! 

There is something behind it. Isn't it?