Is the vote being cast through the current rounds of Lok Sabha polls going to be secret as mandated under the law by laying down the concept of secret ballot? The answer is not really so, as per Dr Mukulika Banerjee founding director of the London School of Economics’ South Asia Centre and author of book Why India votes?

 

Dr Banerjee points to the lack of use of Totaliser Machines to mix and aggregate votes from a bunch of EVMs, or Electronic Voting Machines, to argue that the voting behaviour of the electorate at booth level can be discerned and harm the secrecy of ballot.

 

She has written a blog on LSE website or lse.ac.uk to say among other things that the move earlier initiated by the Election Commission of India to introduce totalisers to ensure secrecy was shelved affecting the confidentiality of ballot where the choices being made by voters segments could well be discerned and identified.

 

She blames the Government for this: “…the chance to maintain the secrecy of the ballot – a key aspect of democratic elections – was explicitly rejected by the party in power. In 2015, the BJP and its allies blocked the introduction of the totalizer machine, which the Election Commission had commissioned and one that the Law Commission recommended be adopted, which would have electronically ‘mixed’ votes from all polling booths in a constituency before counting.

 

“Earlier, with paper ballots, this used to be done physically in large drums. With the introduction of EVMs in 2004, counting has been done machine by machine, thereby allowing political parties to ascertain how each segment of c.1000 people, the average population covered by a polling booth, voted – for them or against.”

 

As for the fallout of this Dr Banerjee writes further, “One can see why the BJP blocked the Totalizer: as their candidate Maneka Gandhi said recently at a public meeting, her party would look at the booth level data after elections to punish those areas that had not voted for them. Thus the secret ballot, an essential reason why Indians vote in high numbers in elections and have faith in the electoral process in India, stands compromised, but many voters do not even realize it yet.”

 

The Election Commission had mooted the idea to introduce totalisers to ensure greater secrecy of ballot through mixing of votes yielded by EVMs when UPA, or United Progressive Alliance, Government was in office.

 

And as a result of this Bharat Electronics Limited and Electronics Corporation of India Limited have also been able to develop totaliser machines. Yet, these have thus far not been inducted in the process for counting of votes. This is so because the focus of EC, Government and political parties through past few years have been on connecting VVPAT, or Voter-Verified Paper Audit Trail, to EVMs and tallying votes that are cast through electronic machines with the paper trail brought by VVPATs.