CPI(M) general secretary Sitaram Yechury, in a letter to Chief Election Commissioner Sunil Arora, has urged the panel to carry out a 100% tally of all EVM machines with Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) for the coming Assembly elections.
He red-flagged political financing via electoral bonds, and urged the Commission to clarify the steps it is taking to eliminate the adverse effects of money power on the electoral outcome.
Quoting the report by a civil society organisation, Citizens Commission on Elections (CCE), on the functioning of the Indian EVM and VVPAT system, Mr Yechury said it had raised many legitimate questions.
He said that on both accounts of political funding and lack of transparency regarding EVMs the ECI’s response after the 2019 general elections had been far less than adequate. The VVPATs, he said, were introduced in 2013 as a response to address the doubts in the minds of the voters as to whether their intended choice is indeed recorded in the counting process.
“Evidence suggests that the exercise of the choice in the Ballot Unit goes straight into the VVPAT which is seen by the voter. But, whether that is what is being recorded in the Control Unit which counts the votes of the EVM is not known,” he wrote.
Technically speaking, Mr Yechury said, the choice exercised in the ballot unit ought to have been routed through the Control Unit of the EVM which would in turn be transmitted to the VVPAT to be visible to the voter. The current sequence of the three units is otherwise. “There is a strong case for re-working the sequence of placement of these components. This is a critical question. Unfortunately, even after stating this concern, there has been no response from the ECI,” he said.
The CCE report, he said, pointed out that EVMs were not “sacrosanct”.
“If the VVPAT is manipulated and is subsequently connected to the Control Unit, it is possible that the manipulation is reflected in recording the vote. We have not received any authentic response from the ECI on this count so far,” Mr Yechury noted.
The electoral bonds, he said, made corporate funding absolutely opaque.
“We want to remind the EC about its own submission before the apex court, not once but twice, that such unaccounted flow of funds will make it impossible for the Commission to monitor the trail,” he wrote. He said that the EC must come clear on how it is currently dealing with the impact of this opaque corporate funding and neutralise that to ensure a level playing field, its basic mandate under Article 324.
This concern becomes more urgent because of reports that a fresh round of electoral bonds are being issued from April 1, 2021. The data available already shows that 52% of the total funding from all sources has gone to BJP, outstripping the amounts received by all other political parties put together. The Association for Democratic Reforms(ADR) reported that the BJP received a whopping 95% of Electoral Bond funds in the run up to 2019 Lok Sabha elections.
“On the ground, the huge financial resources at the disposal of the BJP is quite visible. Again, this is one area where the Commission has not come out with any detailed plan of action for neutralising the adverse impact,” he said.