[Reader-list] Setback to Election Commission as paper trail pilot poll reports error

[Anivar Aravind]

http://thevotingnews.com/international/asia/india/setback-to-indian-election-commission-as-paper-trail-pilot-poll-reports-errors-menafn-com/

Setback to Election Commission as paper trail pilot poll reports errors

Jul 282011

In a set­back to the Elec­tion Com­mis­sion (EC), its pilot poll
con­ducted on Sun­day to estab­lish a paper trail for elec­tronic
vot­ing machines (EVMs) reported sig­nif­i­cant errors.

Pre­lim­i­nary results of the EC pilot poll indi­cated
dis­crep­an­cies between votes polled in EVMs and the paper trail,
accord­ing to three peo­ple involved and famil­iar with the test­ing
process. Two of them are EC offi­cials who con­firmed the mis­match,
but did not give any more details. EC will release a com­pre­hen­sive
report on the pilot poll in a few days.

“Even a dif­fer­ence of one vote is not accept­able,” said one of the
EC offi­cials, who, like the other EC offi­cial famil­iar with the
mat­ter, asked not to be iden­ti­fied given the con­tro­ver­sial
nature of the findings.

To be sure, the dis­crep­ancy does not nec­es­sar­ily vin­di­cate the
stand of crit­ics who have argued that EVMs can be manip­u­lated, but
raises ques­tions on the effi­cacy of the back-up sys­tem that EC was
con­sid­er­ing to enhance trans­parency in the­elec­toral process.

Accord­ing to an analy­sis by the Cit­i­zens for Ver­i­fi­a­bil­ity,
Trans­parency and Account­abil­ity in Elec­tions (VeTA), an activist
group cam­paign­ing against EVMs, almost one in 20 votes polled in
Delhi, one of the four places where the pilot poll was con­ducted,
didn’t have a cor­re­spond­ing paper bal­lot. VeTA’s
rep­re­sen­ta­tives were invited to be part of the elec­tion process.

“This def­i­nitely is some sort of embar­rass­ment for us. How­ever,
these are not issues that can­not be resolved. They are…technical
prob­lems which are not dif­fi­cult to sort,” said the sec­ond EC
official.

Sev­eral polit­i­cal par­ties, includ­ing the main oppo­si­tion
Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Com­mu­nist Party of India
(Marx­ist), too, claim EVMs are not tamper-proof and have been
demand­ing a paper backup.

To assuage them, the trial –con­ducted in Leh (Jammu & Kash­mir),
Thiru­vanan­tha­pu­ram (Ker­ala), Jaisalmer (Rajasthan) and in
Delhi–tested the voter ver­i­fi­able paper audit trail pro­to­types
made by Bharat Elec­tron­ics Ltd and Elec­tron­ics Corp. of India Ltd.
The pilot took place in Megha­laya on Tuesday.

The sys­tem on trial com­prises an inter­face that con­nects an EVM to
a printer and has a list of can­di­date details cor­re­spond­ing with
the EVM. When a per­son votes for a can­di­date on the EVM, a paper
bal­lot with a ser­ial num­ber, name and sym­bol of the can­di­date
will be printed.
“There were 35,791 votes polled in Delhi, each of which had two paper
back­ups. So of what should have been around 70,000 paper trails,
around 3,500 were miss­ing. This means there was an error rate of 5%,”
said G.V.L. Narasimha Rao, pres­i­dent of VeTA, and a mem­ber of BJP’s
elec­toral reforms committee.