New Delhi: The Citizens’ Commission on Elections and technocrat Sam Pitroda Thursday said a group will be put in place to monitor the 2024 Lok Sabha elections. This group will comprise seven members including four from overseas.Speaking to reporters from Chicago, Pitroda said, “The modalities are being worked out and this group will keep a watch on the elections. The citizens have lost faith in the present system of conducting elections using EVMs.” This group will be looking at issues other than EVMs, such as those raised by the CCE including flaws in the electoral rolls and the conduct of the Election Commission of India.The only way to conduct elections is paper ballots if the trust deficit is to be bridged, Pitroda said, adding that the civil society has repeatedly been petitioning the Election Commission of India to either go back to paper ballots or to do a 100% count of the VVPAT slips.“This is not about pushing for digital India. It is about going back to the fundamentals, going back to paper. And the 2024 election will decide the destiny of the nation for a long time to come. The voter no longer knows whom to trust where EVMs and VVPATs are concerned. We have to convince the voter, not the ECI,” he said. The ECI has been steadfast in its refusal to address the concerns of civil society even though the concerns raised in the CCE report are alarming, he said.Responding to questions whether the INDIA bloc would be urged to add this demand of paper ballots to their manifestos, Pitroda, who said he is speaking as an Indian citizen and not as a member of the Congress party, said, “Manifestos come in the end. This problem has to be solved now.”On the fact that the opposition is not speaking in one voice on the issue of EVMs Pitroda said, “My advice to the opposition is to wake up. But it is for the opposition parties to answer as to how they intend to take up an issue that affects them all.”CCE convenor M.G. Devasahayam said various citizens’ groups have been trying to draw the attention of the ECI to concerns about the conduct of the elections but to little avail. He said the CCE report put together by global experts in the fields of computer science and electronics has clearly said, “In the absence of end-to-end verifiability of the voting process the present system is unfit for democratic elections.”Devasahayam said, “In practice, there is a requirement for 100% counting of VVPAT slips. The system should be software and hardware-independent to be verifiable, which is why the German Supreme Court threw out EVMs and declared unconstitutional any electoral process that does not comply with the principles of democracy and end-to-end verifiability meaning the voter should be in a position to verify her vote has been cast as intended and recorded as cast. That is not happening in the present system.”Criticising critics who say paper ballots are a long tedious process of counting, Devashayam said, “it takes weeks, if not months to conduct an election. But when it comes to the counting process, they are in a tearing hurry and want to get over the counting process in a hurry.Both Pitroda and Devashayam said the issue is no longer about whether the system can be hacked or the lack of transparency or the software used. The issue, they said, is to revive the trust of the people in democracy.
