APN Live: National: Saturday, August 05, 2017.
In a fresh
twist to the ongoing debate over the reliability and security of Electronic
Voting Machines (EVMs), a bunch of documents accessed under the Right to
Information (RTI) Act from Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh shows how
ahead of various assembly and general elections since 2003, several incidents
of these machines being stolen were reported.
The RTI
documents accessed by Congress activists Tehseen and Shehzad Poonawalla raise
one pertinent question if EVMs can’t be tampered with then why are they
repeatedly stolen? Furthermore, even those police complaints that were
registered against specific individuals, including three election commission
officials in Gujarat, on the charge of stealing the machines have failed to
achieve conviction by any court despite charges of the theft being proven.
The RTI
revelations came on a day when the Election Commission informed the Supreme
Court during proceedings in a public interest litigation filed by advocate ML
Sharma that not only are the EVMs used in Indian elections ‘fully tamper-proof
and credible machines, which can’t be hacked’ but also that they are “better
than the machines used in US, Germany, the Netherlands and Ireland”. Sharma’s
petition has sought discontinuation of the EVMs on the grounds that they can be
tampered with and has asked for a rollback to the paper ballot system of
casting votes.
Earlier this
year, the reliability of EVMs had emerged as a major political debate when
during an inspection of the machines by the state’s chief electoral office
Salina Singh days before a bypoll for the Ater assembly seat in Madhya
Pradesh’s Bhind district, it was found that the machines were registering votes
in favour of the BJP irrespective of which party it was actually being cast
for.
The
Poonawalla brothers also shared the documents on micro-blogging website Twitter
but curiously while EVMStolen was the top trending story for several hours on
the site, receiving over 20000 tweets and re-tweets, it suddenly disappeared
from the Twitter trends list by Friday afternoon.
The RTI documents,
however, raise severe doubts on the tall claims put forth by the EC in its
affidavit filed by the commission’s director (law), Vijay Kumar Pandey before
the apex court.
Take for
instance the documents accessed from Gujarat. In a correspondence dated July
21, 2008 the then chief electoral officer of the state, Vinod Kumar Babbar had
written to the then Secretary, Election Commission of India, informing him of
EVMs going missing from a training class of polling officials in Jamnagar
district ahead of the 2007 Gujarat assembly polls.
Babbar’s
letter certainly the most damning of the RTI documents from the three states names
three trainers, Jitendra Valji Kalawadia, Shantilal Rajkotiya Patel and Suresh
Kumar Nandasana, and says that they had “behaved in a careless and doubtful
manner… the persons appear to have become encouraged to misuse and take away
the Electronic Voting Machines”.
A simple
perusal of Babbar’s comments in the letter “encouraged to misuse and take away
the EVMs” beckons the question: what is the possible misuse of an EVM that an
official can indulge in if not to tamper with it?
Babbar also
states that “on December 1, 2007, after the first batch of training was over,
the trainer Jitendra Valji Kalawadia handed over the EVMs to others during the
recess time and went away for lunch. When he returned the machine was found
missing”.
An
investigation carried out by the Jamnagar police into a complaint filed by
Babbar’s office against Kalawadia and other polling officials led to the
questioning of 56 trainers following which lie detectors tests were recommended
for Kalawadia, Patel and Nandasana at the forensic science laboratory (FSL) in
Gandhinagar.
Babbar’s
letter, that was sent to the Election Commission some six months before he
abruptly resigned from his post as Gujarat’s chief electoral officer and took
voluntary retirement from the administrative services, says that the three
officials had undergone multiple lie detector tests and that “the answers given
by Kalawadia were not found true by the FSL” which in turn suggested a further
line of inquiry.
Accusing the
Election Commission of “misleading the Supreme Court” on the reliability of the
EVMs, Tehseen Poonawalla told APNLive: “the documents show how security of EVMs
has not been ensured by the officials concerned ahead of polls in not one but
at least three states during successive Assembly and Lok Sabha elections… If an
EVM can’t be tampered with, why would anyone especially a polling official as
is the case with Jamnagar in Gujarat steal the machine”.
Tehseen said
that he wants to know from the EC about the action taken against Kalawadia and
other officials from Jamnagar who were named in Babbar’s complaint. Also, he
now intends to file a petition in the Supreme Court backed with the RTI
documents as potential evidence of how security of the EVMs has been and can be
compromised.
Asked whether
he had selectively sought information regarding theft of EVMs from BJP-ruled
states, Tehseen said: “I wanted the data from across the country but the EC has
not been very forthcoming. I am hopeful that in days to come I will be able to
access more documents about EVM theft from other states too since I am aware a
few specific cases that don’t find mention in the documents given to me so far.
But, that the documents presented are all from BJP-ruled states is a matter of
pure co-incidence”.
The cases
from MP and Chhattisgarh
In a letter
dated April 27, 2017, SS Bansal, the joint chief electoral officer of Madhya
Pradesh informed Arvind Anand, EC secretary that multiple cases of EVM thefts
had been reported from the states Rewa and Bhind districts in elections that
took place in 2003, 2008, 2014 (for the MP assembly) and 2009 (Lok Sabha). The
maximum cases of EVM theft were reported from Bhind during each of the Assembly
elections. Though in most cases the Bhind and Rewa police had registered cases
of loot and theft against unidentified miscreants, even in cases where specific
individuals were named and EVMs were recovered from them, the police either
failed to achieve a conviction or hearings in the case took an extremely
sluggish pace. No comments have been made by Bansal on whether the reason for
the EVM theft was investigated or revealed.
The
Chhattisgarh electoral office on the other hand has, in a letter dated April
26, 2017, informed EC director Mukesh Meena, that though a large number of EVMs
had been stolen from various blocks of the state’s naxal-hit Dantewada region
during the 2003 and 2008 assembly polls and again in the 2004 and 2009 Lok
Sabha polls, those responsible for the loot were always Naxalites who wanted to
disrupt the election process.
Repeated
attempts for a comment on the RTI documents from officials of the Election
Commission of India went unanswered though a senior official, on condition of
anonymity, said that the commission was presenting its case before the Supreme
Court and its submissions should be taken as the EC’s version.
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