Former Chief Election Commissioner SY Quraishi on Friday stated that 100% of the Voter Verified Paper Audit Path slips needs to be verified as a part of the vote counting course of.
Quraishi’s remark, in a social media publish, comes simply months forward of the 2024 Lok Sabha elections.
The Voter Verified Paper Audit Path is an impartial verification system for digital voting machines. The method permits voters to verify if their votes have been forged appropriately.
The system is helpful in detecting attainable election fraud or malfunctioning of the voting machines. The slips that the VVPAT machines generate can be utilized to audit voting information saved electronically. The slips usually are not handed over to the voters, however collected in a separate field.
Presently, slips from solely 5 randomly chosen polling stations in every Meeting section are verified. That is completed after the ultimate spherical of counting of votes, recorded within the digital voting machines, has concluded.
“[Counting all VVPAT slips] gained’t take greater than a day,” Quraishi wrote on social media platform X. “However [this will] restore folks’s confidence. That’s important for credible elections.”
I’ve prompt counting of 100% vvpats. Gained’t take greater than a day. However restore folks’s confidence. That’s important for credible elections. https://t.co/MvWJqJ2fU2
— Dr. S.Y. Quraishi (@DrSYQuraishi) December 29, 2023
The previous election commissioner was responding to a query by a social media consumer who requested if it could be viable for voters to deposit their VVPAT slips into poll packing containers on the time of voting, and for these slips to be counted later to corroborate the information from the digital voting machines.
On December 19, the Opposition Indian Nationwide Developmental Inclusive Alliance had adopted a decision that sought 100% of the VVPAT slips be counted as a part of the verification course of.
“Our suggestion is straightforward: As a substitute of the voter-verified paper audit path slip falling within the field, it needs to be handed over to the voter who shall then place it in a separate poll field after having verified his or her selection,” the Opposition alliance stated in its decision. “A hundred percent counting of VVPAT slips ought to then be completed.”
On December 3, Quraishi had written in The Telegraph that there’s a “want for critical affirmative motion” by the polling physique to assuage doubts which were raised about India’s digital voting system.
“EVMs have been in use since 1998…If the machines have been hackable, the federal government below which the machines have been first made wouldn’t have misplaced elections in any respect,” Quraishi wrote. “Most notably, the mighty ruling celebration, the BJP, misplaced only a few months in the past in Karnataka and Himachal Pradesh and, earlier, in West Bengal, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh. Can there be higher proof?”
Regardless of this, the previous election commissioner stated, public distrust within the veracity of digital voting machines has been “dangerously growing”. He prompt that the election fee name an all-party assembly and arrive at a consensus on the best way to rebuild public belief.
“As a final resort, even when [100%] needs to be counted to achieve public belief, they [the election commission] ought to think about it,” he wrote. “How does it matter if it takes a couple of additional hours or perhaps a day? In spite of everything, the nation waits for counting for over two months from the primary day [phase] of [the] ballot.”
In Might 2019, the Supreme Court docket dismissed a petition in search of 100% verification of the Voter Verified Paper Audit Path slips with outcomes from the digital voting machines in the course of the counting of votes for the Lok Sabha elections that month.
