Indian Voting Machines - Benefits

Benefits

• The cost per EVM (One Control Unit, one Balloting Unit and one battery) was Rs.5,500/- at the time the machines were purchased in 1989-90. Even though the initial investment was somewhat heavy, it was more than neutralised by the savings in the matter of production and printing of ballot papers in lakhs, their transportation, storage etc., and the substantial reduction in the counting staff and the renumeration paid to them.
• It will be easier to transport the EVMs compared to ballot boxes as EVMs are lighter, portable and come with polypropylene carrying cases.
• The vote-counting is very fast and the result can be declared within 2 to 3 hours as compared to 30–40 hours, on an average, under the ballot-paper system.
• In countries like India, where illiteracy is still a factor, illiterate people find EVMs easier than ballot paper system, where one has to put the voting stamp on the symbol of the candidate of his/her choice, fold it first vertically and then horizontally, and put it into the ballot box. In EVMs, the voter has to simply press the blue button against the candidate and symbol of his choice and the vote is recorded.
• Bogus voting can be greatly reduced by the use of EVMs. In case of ballot paper system, a bogus voter can stuff thousands of bogus ballot papers inside the ballot box. But, an EVM is programmed to record only five votes in a minute. This will frustrate the bogus voters. Further, the maximum number of votes that can be cast in a single EVM is 3840.
• If an EVM goes out-of-order then, the Election Officer, in-charge of the polling booth, can replace the defunct EVM with a spare EVM. The votes recorded until the stage when the EVM went out of order remain safe in the memory of the Control Unit and it is not necessary to start the poll from the beginning.
• The Control Unit can store the result in its memory for 10 years and even more. The battery is required only to activate the EVMs at the time of polling and counting. As soon as the polling is over, the battery can be switched off and this will be required to be switched on only at the time of counting. The battery can be removed as soon as the result is taken and can be kept separately. Therefore, there is no question of battery leaking or otherwise damaging EVMs. Even when the battery is removed the memory in the microchip remains intact. If the Court orders a recount, the Control Unit can be reactivated by fixing the battery and it will display the result stored in the memory.
• Invalid votes can be reduced by use of EVMs. With EVMs, there are much less incidences of invalid votes, i. e. less than 0.02% (source: Tiwari and Herstatt, 2012, p. 17, Table 4). When ballot system was used in India, the number of invalid votes was allegedly more than the winning margin between the candidates in every general elections (source needed).
• Environmental effects of EVMs: For each national election alone it is estimated that about 10,000 tons of ballot paper (roughly 200,000 trees) would be saved. There are of course many more state and city/village level elections and the cost of printing those ballot papers would be also enormous (see: Tiwari and Herstatt, 2012, p. 17).