Chennai: April 7 will see the start of the elections to the Lok Sabha in which around 81.5 crore people are eligible to vote.
The conduct of the world’s biggest democratic exercise is almost magical with a bipartisan Election Commission invested with the responsibility of seeing to it that the polls are run in a fair manner.
Behind the EC is a little secret that ensures that the polls are indeed honest. The little white box known as the Electronic Voting Machine or simply EVM is the finest innovation of modern India.
Politicians of different hues may rave and rant about the the EVMs but their overall efficiency is what lends credibility to elections in the world’s largest democracy. The Indian EVM is one of the most refined systems in the world.
The secret is that it is an independent machine that is not hooked up in serial connectivity to anything else.
This is this very quality of aloofness of standalone electronic gadget that makes it nearly foolproof. Many politicians have said the EVM can be fixed and manipulated by the powers that be.
Many have tried to present methods by which it could be fixed but nothing has been proved.
Not even the US elections have been known to be so refined in its ability to gather all the votes in such a clean manner.
The standalone Indian system may lead to painful processes in storage and retrieval of EVMs on counting day, but the simplicity of the idea of a standalone machine can be gleaned from the fact that it can be manipulated only at the booth level and not by some central data management centre.
