Indian Government’s decision to allot around ₹10,000 crores ($1.49 billion) to the Election Commission (EC) to procure new Voter Verifiable Paper Audited Trail (VVPAT) ballot machines is a success story of Senior BJP leader Subramanian Swamy’s long battle against the doubtful Electronic Voting Machines (EVM). The Union Cabinet meeting chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on July 20 took this big decision to dump the old EVM’s purchased from 2000 to 2005.



India’s usage of EVM’s with dumb manipulative redundant technology was doubted many times due to the controversial election results it threw up. These doubtful machines, which were proven to be manipulate-able were used from the mid-90s. During these times, most of the countries started abandoning these controversial machines and even those that invented and manufacturing these machines.



One advantage of implementation of EVMs was the stoppage of booth capturing, a recurring instance for decades. On the contrary, the EVMs were not fool proof. There is no record for the cast of votes and one can’t check to whom the voter cast his/ her vote.



After the Lok Sabha elections in 2009, widespread doubts on the genuineness of these machines came into the public domain. But the winners always discarded this as losers’ conspiracy theory and the EC was adamant on using this EVMs with redundant technology. As usual, Congress termed this too as Swamy’s routine conspiracy theory.



By the end of 2009, Subramanian Swamy started a widespread campaign against these machines and started demonstrating how the EVMs could be easily manipulated. The EC even registered police complaints for hacking against the technocrats who helped Swamy show how the EVMs could be hacked to produce “desired” results. The EC was not amused and even accused a technocrat of theft! Swamy and veteran technocrat S Kalyanaraman came out with a book on the illegality of EVMs.



The Election Commission started facing the heat when Swamy took up the matter before the Supreme Court. EC initially resisted this, saying that printers were not available across the country. During the arguments, Judges even rebuked Ashok Desai, counsel for EC, for saying that printers are not available across India. Till reserving Judgment in mid 2013, the EC and the Government vehemently objected to attaching of VVPAT machines which produces a paper slip as soon as the voter cast his vote on the voting unit. VVPAT was intended to serve two things:

The Voter could see a print out of his vote fall into a separate box and In close contests, the printed slips could be used for recounting.