The most fundamental rule of data science is: collect the data at its source and if that is entirely impossible, collect it as close to the source as ever possible.
Arguably the most important data that the Election Commission deals with are the votes registered on polling day.
Electronic Voting Machines or EVMs register these votes. EVMs display the count of votes registered. EVMs do not display the percentage of polling. Percentage of polling is a calculated number, or in other words, it is processed data. It is against the fundamental principles to collect calculated data when unprocessed and raw data is easily available at source. Using this calculated number leads to fundamental problems like possible ‘vote leakage’. More on this later.
The observers’ handbook of August 2024, in line item 4, on page 37, mentions the following as duty of the poll observer:
“Register of Voters (Form 17A) must be checked with display of total votes polled on EVM and Observer must sign the visit sheet along with his observation and record the time of his/her visit.”
It is obvious from this that the number of votes polled is available on the EVM at all times on polling day, since there is no mention of when a poll observer should visit the booth on polling day or how many visits the observer should make.
In my search of the guidelines published on its website by the EC, I was unable to find reference to any directive that mandates the EC to publish the vote percentage and not publish the vote count.
I was also unable to find any reference to any standard operating procedure (SOP) on how the polling officer must calculate the percentage.
The webpage for the ‘Voter Turnout’ app on the ECI website clearly mentions that it is a “mobile app to display the approximate voter turnout percentage”. This is an official app launched by the EC, a constitutional authority mandated and entrusted the responsibility of conducting fair, transparent elections that citizens can trust. The mention of the percentage of voter turnout in a news item by non-constitutional entities is entirely different from a constitutional entity using and disseminating an approximate count as primary data.
Such legitimisation of obfuscating the citizen’s view of vital data, coupled with no visible SOP for calculating the numbers that potentially decide the fate of the democratic polity, is a deeply disturbing revelation.
Also read: Why the Supreme Court Verdict on EVMs Is Disappointing
As such I decided to file Right to Information requests. To my dismay, the EC RTI portal has become extremely unreliable, flaky and inconsistent compared to a year ago. Over 72 hours, I made several attempts to file RTIs, but only three RTIs show up on the portal, although I paid the Rs 10 RTI fee seven times. Thrice, the server reported an ‘Error 500’ after the payment was made. In each case the RTI was not recorded on the server. The remaining four times, the page just blanked out.
Even worse, for each of the three RTIs that show up on the server, I had to make between five and 15 attempts.
Following are the questions that I intended to ask the EC through the RTIs. As you will see, each deals directly with the process, or the accountability of ECI to the common Indian citizen and ethical conduct of a public office.
- Is the count of votes cast available at every booth at all times?
- Does the EC have a specific guideline or directive not to enter the vote count on its website every two hours?
- Does the EC have a specific guideline or directive not to publish the vote count on its website every two hours?
- Can polling officers enter the percentage of votes cast when ENCORE fails to connect to the server?
- If polling offers cannot enter the percentage of votes cast at the given time after every two hours, is there any alternate process to update the percentage to the server (the ECI guideline mandates officer to upload the percentage at 9 am, 11 am, 1 pm, 3 pm, 5 pm and 7 pm)?
- Does EC software on the web server highlight polling booths that have not entered polling data every two hours?
- Does EC software on the web server generate exception reports that list polling booths not complying with guidelines for updating vote data?
- Does EC have a review committee that reviews data updation process throughout the polling day?
- Does EC have a review committee to escalate non-compliance to the Election Commissioners?
- Is it the Election Commissioner’s responsibility to immediately inform the public of non-compliance with data upload guidelines via the EC website?
- What is the acceptable time gap between noticing non-compliance and informing the public via the EC website?
- Are there any penal actions if such information is not shared within a mandated time?
- What are the penal actions when information is not published within the stipulated time by the Election Commissioners?
- Does EC have any guideline or method to calculate the percentage of votes cast?
- Does EC have any SOP to verify the accuracy of the percentage calculated by every polling officer?
- Does EC verify the accuracy of the percentage calculated by every polling officer every two hours when the percentage data is uploaded via the ENCORE app?
- Is there any directive or guideline to upload the final vote percentage at 11:59 pm on polling day?
- What is the time before which the final voting percentage must be uploaded via the ENCORE app?
- What is the time before which the final voting percentage must be publicly visible on the ECI website?
- Is the Control Unit (CU) electronically paired with the Ballot Unit (BU) or VVPAT making it impossible to replace one CU with another after the voting has ended?
Page 41 of the handbook of August 2024 mentions, “The Observers will ensure that RO/DEO and the technical staff assisting them have tested the ENCORE software and are ready for fast transmission of final result to ECI using this software.”
The ENCORE app, described in various other EC documents as the end-to-end app developed in-house by the EC, can clearly upload the data almost instantly. In the digital era where even WhatsApp messages get delivered almost instantly, this should hardly be a surprise.
In such a scenario, it is only fair that there be a very close time limit to publish the data after polling has ended.
Also read: Election Commission’s FAQs on EVMs Don’t Really Address Major Design Deficiencies
It is important here to relate to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) guidelines about data. These are accepted worldwide as the most democratic and comprehensive.
Drawing from there, we must conclude: The ownership of the data is with citizens and not with the EC. The EC is a mere custodian of the votes cast. Owners have the right to their data and the custodian is duty bound to service the data immediately and without processing, upon request.
Calculating the percentage amounts to processing the data. Publishing the count is servicing unprocessed data. The EC therefore must be considered duty bound to publish the vote count and not the vote percentage as a replacement to the vote count.
Also, being an approximation, vote percentage may substantively lead to vote leakage. This means that some votes may not get reflected in the vote percentage when it is a rounded number. For example, if a polling station with say 10,000 voters has 10 polling booths, each with 1,000 voters. If each booth records 643 votes, each booth will have 64.3% voting. If the percentage is reported by each booth as a rounded figure (64 instead of 64.3), three votes from each booth will go unaccounted. When extrapolated to a million, this leaves serious possibilities of a few thousand votes being transferred or defrauded.
I had asked these questions for well over a year ago now and the EC has never answered it. It is a simple, fool-proof way to prevent the most obvious malpractice possible today. Not answering it only leaves open suspicion and with very good reason.
In spite of the serious loss of credibility of the Indian judiciary – even more so in recent times – as a common citizen, I would like and want the Supreme Court to take note of these very foundational queries and seek answers from the ECI on behalf of us.
This should be the duty of the opposition in a lively democracy with responsible and mature opposition. It is sad that opposition is as much responsible for the degradation of the Indian electoral system as the party in power. It is sad that not many trust the EC to provide responsible answers to the Indian citizen or to conduct itself in a respectable way.
The Supreme Court should take suo motu cognisance or it should be moved to recognise the violation of people’s right to know the actual data in the form of vote count when only a percentage of voting is published.
The SC should also be moved to issue an order to the ECI to publish the actual vote count at the end of the polling day so that the count does not change after 24, 48 or 72 hours – or even later. Any change in the vote count is an admission that the EVMs are defective, unreliable and not trustworthy, as electronic votes once cast have no way to either disappear or multiply. This surely must be the minimum intervention the SC can do to protect the democracy, and citizens’ right to factual information.
If the ECI insists on publishing the percentage, the SC should direct it to publish both the number of votes and the percentage, but in any case, the count of votes must be published on the EC website at the end of the voting day. The SC must ensure that.
Madhav Deshpande is a former CEO of Tulip Software and a former consultant to the Obama administration in the United States. He is one of India’s foremost experts on EVMs.