BJP says exit polls will fall flat on counting day – I wonder where this confidence comes from. Are they counting on the fact that in many booths, whatever party voters selected, their votes were registering in the BJP’s account? After the murkiness of Lok Sabha results especially in Banaras, with EVMs found in officials’ homes before election day and 3 lakh duplicate voters on the lists, the Election Commission’s ‘clarifications’ raising more questions than they answered, such possibilities no longer seem paranoid.

(The Election Commission said that in Banaras it found 6.47 lakh duplicated names, all of which are repeated at least once across the state. The official said, however, that these are not all necessarily fake entries in the rolls. They could be people who share a name. “For instance, a ‘Rajesh, son of Ramesh’, might be found several times in UP,” he said. “We are in the process of checking whether these people are same or different.”

The question is, when the process was to compare both the voter’s as well as his/her father’s name with other voters, how were 6.5 lakh duplicate names found in a constituency with 17 lakh voters?)

But my point in this post is not about electoral rolls, and a growing suspicion among many that the EC is not entirely un-compromised.

My point is that Electronic Voting Machines are extremely problematic from the point of view of exercising the democratic right to vote (not to mention costs) and have been given up by many ‘advanced’ countries after trying them out for some years. Whatever happens in this particular election, it is time for Indian citizens to think seriously about whether EVMs should be retained. Continue reading BJP’s bravado on exit polls – do they know something about EVMs that we don’t? →