Dear Editor,

Kudos are in order to the Indian government for switching from paper ballots to electronic voting. Beginning April 16, India, known as the world’s largest democracy, goes to the polls to choose a national assembly of 543 MPs. The voting process will be quite different from that used in other countries and even in India itself. India’s voting is going almost completely electronic – eliminating the use of paper ballots that were used in previous elections. The country will be using sophisticated electronic voting machines that are not even in use in America.

Some 740 million voters are eligible to vote, and this will be the first time all the states with three exceptions will use electronic voting. There will be a whopping 1.5 million EVMs to accommodate the voters in 829,000 polling stations over five days of voting.

India experimented with electronic voting machines in a few states in the last general elections in 2004 and in some assembly elections over the last five years. The Elections Commission does not expect any electronic hiccups in the voting process.  After using it in the 2004 elections, “India had become a role model for the use of EVMs which had won global recognition for their ability to collect, record, store, count and display voting data in quick time with no scope for discrepancy,” says the maker of the machines.

It was pointed out that the EVMs, “apart from speeding up the voting and counting processes, eliminated the scope for invalid votes, which sometimes might mar the winning chances of a candidate.”

Several African countries like Kenya, Nigeria, Ghana, and Zimbabwe are looking at the Indian experiment with EVMs to see if it can help to avoid the problems they recently experienced with paper ballots. The EVMs are cost-effective, eco-friendly (as they eliminate the need for ballot papers) and substantially reduce the counting staff. Guyana may also want to take a look at these EVMs, although affordability may be a problem.

Yours faithfully,
Vishnu Bisram