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This is not easy. Thread. https://twitter.com/arungiri/status/1326192869628018694
I speak as someone who witnessed first hand the process of tallying EVM counts with VVPAT slips as a counting agent for an independent candidate in one of the constituencies; and as someone who...
... acted as counsel for petitioners including @alwaysfranc who presented before the supreme court a mountain of evidence to show how there has to be a minimum cross-tally of atleast 30% of the polling stations in each assembly segment to achieve decent statistical confidence...
(In which the Supreme Court eventually ordered a cross-tally of only five Polling Stations in each segment)...
The VVPAT slips need a radical redesign to facilitate these tallies.
The thermal slips are too small, too thin and stick too often to each other.
The thermal slips are too small, too thin and stick too often to each other.
The classification and counting of the slips are very error prone and almost guaranteed to return different results (off by 1 or 2 %) during every exercise of the count.
This leads the tallying personnel to conclude that the counts have tallied so long as the counts are off by only a few votes - making the whole exercise pointless.
And the personnel deployed for the VVPAT slip counting are often cash handling officials from public sector banks. They complained of how these are nothing like counting cash and their fast cash counting skills are practically of little use.
The exercise becomes even more problematic in seats with razor thin margins. Even a slightly off count will drive the candidates to cry wolf.
My take away is that - a) the statistical jugglery of tallying is anyway too arbitrary and non - transparent;
b) the questions over integrity of EVMs will remain irrespective of ECI assurances;
c) the present design of VVPAT slips and the tallying with electronic votes...
b) the questions over integrity of EVMs will remain irrespective of ECI assurances;
c) the present design of VVPAT slips and the tallying with electronic votes...
... Is not the answer ;
d) There are no obvious arguments against the return to paper ballots.
d) There are no obvious arguments against the return to paper ballots.
The arguments on time and manpower intensiveness don't cut for such a crucial exercise. An election process is months long anyway. How does that matter if the counting takes a couple of days?
Again, this is not to sling mud at any particular electoral result or to irresponsibly undermine a crucial process of democracy.
