
Democracy would regress if we dump EVMs and revert to paper ballots
Summary
- Paper voting is not only extremely costly, it would expose India’s electoral processes to vote rejections and malpractices that EVM adoption helped us leave behind.
The keenly fought 2000 US presidential election between George W. Bush and Al Gore was decided by the US Supreme Court, which stopped a manual count of votes initiated by Florida’s top court, terming it a violation of the country’s constitutional framework. Bush was finally declared the winner with a small margin.
Two important guiding ideas came into play. First, the equal protection clause, which lets an individual county within a state determine the validity of polled votes unique to its own understanding (given conflicting manual recount standards). Second, the need to truthfully capture the “intent of the voter"—the holy grail of democracy.
A significant outcome of the contentious result was a broad US shift from manual vote counting in favour of a Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) machine system.
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The rapid adoption of electronic voting machines (EVMs) in the US, peaking at 30% in 2010, was unfortunately checkmated during the 2016 Trump-versus-Clinton election amid the purported meddling by outsiders in the electoral database and process.
America came full circle, with flip-flops that have made its electoral system a near mockery of democratic processes. India, under the guidance of the Election Commission of India (ECI), did not mimic the West.
When cynics and vested interests nudge the masses to believe unfounded tales of the ECI and EVMs being susceptible to manipulation and raise slogans asking India to revert to the “tried and tested’’ paper ballot system, they seem besieged with a colonial mindset. With the ECI having ring-fenced EVMs against all possible breaches, such cynicism is unwarranted.
The indirect environmental cost of using paper ballots for polling is enormous. Surveys suggest about 10,000 tonnes of paper ballots were saved in the 2024 general election, thanks to EVM usage, saving more than 2 million trees. Also, EVMs can be used for any number of elections, while paper ballots can only be used once.
In terms of direct costs, a back-of-the envelope calculation suggests that reverting to a paper-ballot system could cost the exchequer in excess of ₹10,000 crore for a general election alone, leave aside multiple state/local body elections.
In the general election of May 2024, 642 million Indians voted through EVMs in 542 parliamentary constituencies (at over 1.05 million polling booths), while the total number of eligible voters stood at 978 million (a figure that excludes non-resident Indians).
If one takes the mass printing of ballot paper, with its umpteen security characteristics embedded and space allotted to at least 20-25 contestants’ names and symbols (this number varied between 3 and 54 in 2024), the cost of printing alone can be as high as ₹3,500-4,000 crore for the Voting Eligible Populace (VEP).
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Costs are also incurred at various stages on ballot transportation, safe keeping, security measures, repacking (all done twice in a cycle), training, awareness efforts and storage for a number of years to allow a paper audit trail.
All this poses an additional burden of thousands of crores, without even factoring in the human angle of engaging millions of school teachers, health workers, panchayat-level staff and bank employees, while the entire executive machinery halts developmental work.
This year, a slowdown in government spending during the first half weighed upon economic growth. At a very conservative estimate, an incremental cost of ₹100 can be ascribed to each paper ballot, taking the overall difference to about ₹10,000 crore.
Indian EVMs are now duly supported by a Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) system for sample checks and this approach fares much better than optical ballot scanners deployed in many Western countries.
In pre-EVM days, 70 parliamentary constituencies (about 13% of 542) in the 1999 election had invalid votes in excess of the winning margin, while this number was 104 in the 1967 election (about 19%). With EVMs, invalid votes are virtually nil.
Only 522,513 votes were termed invalid in 2024 (rejected and thus not counted) out of 635.3 million total valid votes polled (i.e. 0.0008%). In contrast, about 12.5% of the postal ballots received were marked invalid.
Why were there so many invalid votes in the pre-EVM era? The voter’s supposedly simple job of folding a long ballot sheet in the right manner (first vertically and then horizontally, clock-wise), lest the vote stamp get smudged, resulted in high rejections. Bogus ‘stuffed’ votes, impersonation, sporadic booth capturing and self-repudiation were also the order of the day.
EVMs work in all weather conditions, have a long lifespan of about 15 years (allowing usage in about 10 elections) and cost only about ₹34,000 per unit.
They also offer unmatched security, as each has a separate ballot unit, control box and VVPAT component that lets the voter see a slip printed with an election symbol for seven seconds through a screen to confirm the vote registered.
“Vox populi, vox dei" (the voice of the people is the voice of God) goes a saying. EVMs help the country uphold both the letter and spirit of those words.
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Should we revert to paper ballots, the cost of conducting elections would rise, providing ammunition to vested interests, including outsiders, that may want to meddle in India’s democratic processes and create a vicious loop of false feedback to hurt our democracy.
These are the author’s personal views.
Ashish Kumar contributed to the article.