New Delhi: A public interest petition in the Bombay High Court has pointed out that two million electronic voting machines (EVMs) that the manufacturers affirm to have delivered are “missing” from the possession of India’s Election Commission, the leading Frontline magazine claimed on Thursday.

Issues relating to the “vulnerability” and “unreliability” of EVMs have come up regularly in the context of the 2019 general election. Complaints filed by opposition parties on specific instances of malfunctioning of EVMs, raised jointly by 21 opposition parties, to match 50 per cent of VVPATs (Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trails) in each Assembly segment of a parliamentary constituency with the EVM results highlighted these issues.

“The Election Commission of India’s [ECI] response to a large number of these issues has been characterised as ambiguous and specious by political observers, opposition politicians and retired senior civil servants. The ECI’s resistance to the demand to match 50 per cent of VVPATs with the EVM results has come in for severe criticism from all these sections,” the magazine said.

In a joint letter addressed to President Ram Nath Kovind, 66 retired civil servants, characterised the ECI’s conduct as “obdurate”, according to the report. The “reluctance to undertake a proper VVPAT audit when its present sample size fails to detect a ‘defective EVM’ [i.e. a malfunctioning or manipulated EVM] 99 per cent of the time raises serious questions about its [ECI’s] motives”, they said in the letter. They pointed out that the institution was going through a “crisis of credibility”.

The ECI’s responses to a public interest litigation (PIL) petition on EVMs in the Bombay High Court over the past 13 months are perhaps illustrative of its approach to the issue. The PIL filed on March 27, 2018, by Manoranjan Roy, a right to information (RTI) activist in Mumbai, was about the processes involved in the procurement, storage and deployment of EVMs and VVPATs by the ECI and State Election Commissions (SECs).

The RTI documents highlighted glaring discrepancies in all three operations — procurement, storage and deployment—and also pointed to grave financial irregularities to the tune of INR116.55 crore.

Published in Dawn, May 10th, 2019