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Elections 2024: Critical Flaws – What’s Going Wrong This Election?

Prema Sridevi interviews Kannan Gopinathan, a former IAS officer who resigned in the name of transparency. Kannan discusses critical issues plaguing elections 2024 offering an in-depth analysis of what's going wrong.

By Prema Sridevi
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Elections 2024: Critical Flaws – What’s Going Wrong This Election?

Prema Sridevi: Today I'm joined by former IAS officer Kannan Gopinathan. He took a principled stand and resigned from service to protest against the restrictions imposed in Jammu and Kashmir following the abrogation of Article 370. He has been very vocal about the importance of raising questions in a democracy. Throughout his career as an activist and in government service, he has advocated for transparency in governance. Thank you, Kannan, for joining me.

Kannan Gopinathan: Thank you.

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Prema Sridevi: During the 2019 general elections, you served as a Returning Officer. You have since seen and probably experienced first-hand the vulnerabilities of the EVM and VVPAT machines. Tomorrow, we will see the last phase of polling in elections 2024. We are just a few days away from counting. You've always said that with the addition of VVPAT machines, the voting process has become more vulnerable and suspicious. Can you explain this?

Kannan Gopinathan: The original EVM process was essentially based on a custody chain principle. A custody chain principle means that the devices we use have certain qualities and are protected throughout the process. If there are any issues, they are caught during the checks that are in place. The custody chain involved trust—trust in the Election Commission, the election machinery, the officials, etc., and also some part of the participatory process, which includes you can't open a strongroom unless political parties are present, or you can have mock polls in the presence of political parties. So, it was partly participatory but mostly based on the custody chain and the trust aspect of it.

Reason Why We Moved to EVMs

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The reason we moved to EVMs was because the earlier ballot-based process had issues like a large number of invalid votes. Studies showed that in thousands of cases, the election margins were lower than the number of invalid votes itself. Another issue was massive ballot stuffing. For example, if 200 people have not come to the booth, someone with influence could cast those 200 votes fraudulently, which only takes a short time.

So, the EVMs addressed these issues by reducing invalid votes and limiting the possibility of ballot stuffing because each vote takes a certain amount of time to cast, making it hard to add many fraudulent votes quickly. 

“EVMs Surrendered on a Few Counts” 

However, EVMs did surrender on a few issues. One was the secrecy at the booth level. Previously, all ballots were mixed, so it was impossible to know which booth voted for which candidate. With EVMs, we could see booth-wise voting patterns, which can lead to discriminatory policies or revenge, as some politicians have threatened not to help areas that did not vote for them. That information for the politicians come from the lack of secrecy at the booth level. 

Another issue was the verification principle. In the ballot system, voters could verify their vote, and candidates could verify the count during counting. With EVMs, this verification was lost because the voter just presses a button without knowing where the vote goes, and the machine gives a result without a way to verify it. 

Through the EVMs, we surrendered the entire verification process. We were focused on the technical, physical, and procedural security of EVMs. Technically, it was said that the EVMs are rudimentary, one-time programmable devices acting as a standalone device just like calculators. Physically, they said that they are kept under heavy protection under CCTV watch and always opened in the presence of political parties. The third was about the administrative or procedural aspect of it, which again has three parts. One was the candidate agnostic nature. The EVMs did not know who the candidates were. It would only tell you candidate number 1 got these many votes, candidate number 2 got these many votes and so on. So, how can you intelligently manipulate when the EVM doesn’t know. The second part of it was the randomisation. For instance, the EVM’s did not only not know who are the candidate

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