The
Sarvajan Samaj is awaiting for Emperor Ashoka (304-232 BCE) Rule who
was the third king of the Maurya Dynasty. He ruled a truly massive
kingdom that stretched from the Hindu Kush to the Bay of Bengal. It was
India’s first great empire. It is not just that Ashoka ably ruled this
huge empire but the quality of social justice that he brought to his
already strong administration.

With reverence for life,
tolerance, compassion and peaceful co-existence were the cornerstones of
his administration. Under him the earliest know bans on slavery and
capital punishment as well as environmental regulations came into place.

King
Ashoka, the third monarch of the Indian Mauryan dynasty, has come to be
regarded as one of the most exemplary rulers in world history. The
British historian H.G. Wells has written: “Amidst the tens of thousands
of names of monarchs that crowd the columns of history … the name of
Ashoka shines, and shines almost alone, a star.” Although Buddhist
literature preserved the legend of this ruler — the story of a cruel
and ruthless king who converted to Buddhism and thereafter established a
reign of virtue — definitive historical records of his reign were
lacking.

Then in the nineteenth century there came to light a
large number of edicts, in India, Nepal, Pakistan and Afghanistan. These
edicts, inscribed on rocks and pillars, proclaim Asoka’s reforms and
policies and promulgate his advice to his subjects. The present
rendering of these edicts, based on earlier translations, offers us
insights into a powerful and capable ruler’s attempt to establish an
empire on the foundation of righteousness, a reign which makes the moral
and spiritual welfare of his subjects its primary concern.

Although
the exact dates of Ashoka’s life are a matter of dispute among
scholars, he was born in about 304 BCE and became the third king of the
Mauryan dynasty after the death of his father, Bindusara. His given name
was Ashoka but he assumed the title Devanampiya Piyadasi which means
“Beloved-of-the-Gods, He Who Looks On With Affection.” There seems to
have been a two-year war of succession during which at least one of
Ashoka’s brothers was killed.

In 262 BCE, eight years after his
coronation, Ashoka’s armies attacked and conquered Kalinga, a country
that roughly corresponds to the modern state of Orissa. The loss of life
caused by battle, reprisals, deportations and the turmoil that always
exists in the aftermath of war so horrified Ashoka that it brought about
a complete change in his personality. It seems that Ashoka had been
calling himself a Buddhist for at least two years prior to the Kalinga
war, but his commitment to Buddhism was only lukewarm and perhaps had a
political motive behind it.

Joining
the controversy regarding the reliablity of Electronic Voting Machines
(EVMs) which have been questioned by political parties, the RSS today
asked the Election Commission (EC) to revert back to tried and tested
paper ballots and subject EVMs to public scrutiny whether these gadgets
are tamper proof. In an editorial titled ‘Can we trust our EVMs?’, The
Organiser, the RSS mouthpiece, noted it was a fact that till date an
absolutely tamper-proof machine had not been invented and credibility of
any system depends on ‘transparency, verifiability and trustworthiness’
than on blind and atavistic faith in its infallibility. The issue is
not a ‘private affair’ and it involves the future of India. Even if the
EVMs were genuine, there was no reason for the EC to be touchy about it,
the paper commented. The Government and the EC can’t impose EVMs as a
fait accompli on Indian democracy as the only option before the voter.
There were flaws like booth capturing, rigging, bogus voting, tampering
and ballot paper snatching in the ballot paper system of polling leading
the country to switch over to the EVMs and all these problems were
relevant in EVMs too. Rigging was possible even at the counting stage.
What made the ballot papers voter-friendly was that all aberrations were
taking place before the public eye and hence open for corrections
whereas the manipulations in the EVMs is entirely in the hands of powers
that be and the political appointees manning the sytem, the paper
commented. The EVM has only one advantage — ’speed’ but that advantage
has been undermined by the staggered polls at times spread over three to
four months. ‘’This has already killed the fun of the election
process,'’ the paper noted. Of the dozen General Elections held in the
country, only two were through the EVMs and instead of rationally
addressing the doubts aired by reputed institutions and experts the
Government has resorted to silence its critics by ‘intimidation and
arrests on false charges’, the paper observed, recalling the arrest of
Hyederabad-based technocrat Hari Prasad by the Mumbai Police. Prasad’s
research has proved that the EVMs were ‘vulnerable to fraud’. The
authorities want to send a message that anybody who challenges the EC
runs the risk of persecution and harassment, the RSS observed. Most
countries around the world looked at the EVMs with suspicion and
countries like the Netherlands, Italy, Germany and Ireland had all
reverted back to paper ballots shunning EVMs because they were ‘easy to
falsify, risked eavesdropping and lacked transparency’. Democracy is too
precious to be handed over to whims or an opaque establishment and
network of unsafe gizmos. ‘’For the health of Indian democracy it is
better to return to tried and tested methods or else elections in future
can turn out to be a farce,'’ the editorial said.

– (UNI) — 28DI28.xml
Sarvajan
Samaj must unitedly approach the CJI to request him to dismiss the
Central Government as the Murderer of democratic institutions & the
Master of diluting institutions (Modi) gobbled the Master Key by
tampering the Fraud EVMs and go for fresh polls with Ballot Papers. The
ex Chief In Justice (CJI) Sathasivam had committed a grave error of
judgement by ordering that the EVMs must be replaced in a phased manner
as suggested by the Chief Election Criminal (CEC) Sampath because it
cost Rs 1600 crore. FIR must be filed on them as they diluted the
Universal Adult Franchise enshrined in our Marvelous Modern
Constitution.
Former CEC, Experts Challenge Election Commission’s Theory on VVPAT Failure
Former
CEC S.Y. Quraishi, in whose term paper audits for EVM machines were
tested and introduced, questions the failure of the system in the recent
by-polls despite all-weather tests.
Former CEC S.Y. Quraishi, in
whose term paper audits for EVM machines were tested and introduced,
questions the failure of the system in the recent by-polls despite
all-weather tests.
New Delhi: The Election Commission on Friday
declared that the reason behind the malfunctioning of a large number of
voter verified paper audit trail (VVPAT) machines during the recently
held by-elections to the Kairana and Bhandara-Gondiya parliamentary
constituencies was due to the “failure of contrast sensor” and “failure
of length sensor” and that both these errors were “mainly caused by
excessive exposure to illumination in the polling station”.

However,
past and present EC officials present at a conclave on elections in
India expressed surprise at this ‘finding’, since the VVPATs have
undergone extensive tests under varying conditions in the past without
malfunctioning.

Failure despite all-weather tests surprises former CEC

Speaking
at the conclave on “EVMs, Election Funding and the Election Commission”
organised by a group of retired civil servants and armed forces
veterans at the Indian Social Institute here, former Chief Election
Commissioner S.Y. Quraishi noted with concern that VVPAT machines were
failing despite undergoing tests in all kinds of weather conditions.

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Quraishi,
in whose term as CEC the testing of VVPATs had taken place from 2011
till their introduction in an election in Nagaland in September 2013,
recalled how tests had first been conducted in wet and humid  Kerala,
dry and hot Jaisalmer, the cold high-altitude of Ladakh, rain-soaked
Cherrapunji and Delhi. He said that since many machines had
malfunctioned after the first round of tests, the necessary changes were
made and they were again tested in all these five different locations.

Wondering
how the Election Commission was now saying that these machines
malfunctioned during the polls on May 28 due to heat, he said it
appeared unlikely to be the cause as these machines had been tested in
the extreme heat of Jaisalmer, which was hotter than the constituencies
where they are said to have not worked properly.

Quraishi for sampling more VVPAT votes after every poll

Quraishi
was also of the view that when it came to VVPATs, there was a need to
sample more of them after every election as the current practice of
taking the count of just one polling station in every constitutency was
too little. While the Supreme Court has not directed the EC on what
percentage of the VVPATs should be counted, Quraishi said it would be
best if the commission went for a significant percentage. “It is wrong
to say that VVPAT counting would delay the results. You can always
deploy more hands for the job to ensure that they too get counted by the
time the electronic votes are.”

Stating that the Supreme Court
has examined VVPATs, Quraishi said the EC only has to operate them. He
also suggested that the winner-loser or other contestants should be
allowed to select a few machines at random for tallying VVPAT votes.

EC assured testing of all 18 lakh VVPATs will be by in-house engineers

The
former CEC also noted that it was the EC’s decision to go for VVPAT
machines and that the Supreme Court had only asked the Centre to release
adequate funds for them. He said that  with 18 lakh machines to be
operationalised ahead of the 2019 Lok Sabha and assembly elections,
people were also wondering how they would be tested and if the job would
be outsourced. “But the EC has assured me that all the testing would be
done by in-house engineers, who too would be randomised for the
machines.”

Current practise of counting VVPAT votes of just one polling station is akin to `marginal tokenism’

Raising
questions on the reliability of the VVPATs, the convener of the Forum
for Electoral Integrity, retired IAS officer M.G. Devasahayam said the
counting of votes of these machines in just one polling station amounted
to just 0.4-0.5% of all votes polled and therefore their use was akin
to “marginal tokenism”.

He demanded that to win the confidence of
the people, a random sample of paper audit trail should be drawn from
machines from booths or polling stations which record very high or low
turnout, which have voters who are predominantly from backward castes or
minorities and the like. He also noted that the VVPAT malfunction
percentage in the by-elections was much higher than the admissible level
of 5% and stood at 20.82% for Kairana, 19.27% for Bhandara-Gondia and
13.16% for Palghar.

EC expert says VVPATs more than mere ‘thermal printers’

A
member of the technical expert committee of the EC, Rajat Moona, while
discussing the unique technical features of VVPATs, said that “they are
not only thermal printers, their print does not fade for five years
unlike those of other similar devices which become faint within a few
days”.

He also said VVPATs are “encapsulated devices” which work
independently and have different sensors which even keep a measure of
the length of its tape and ensure that it remains at 99 mm. He said the
quality of print, the contrast and the fact that every slip is supposed
to drop in the box are all monitored by the machine.

A former
director general of the Centre for Developed and Advanced Computing,
Moona said “each VVPAT machine goes through a temperature-humidity
cycle”. He said behind the recent failure of these machines were caused
by “multiple factors”, including “not enough maturity in handling them”.

These
machines, he said, had earlier been used successfully in the Punjab,
Uttar Pradesh and Gujarat assembly elections. “Yet, when they
encountered trouble the EC said ‘don’t shift them, change them’ since
there were many on standby which could be used”.

EC wants design improvements in VVPATs, training of staff

Meanwhile,
the Election Commission has asked the manufacturers and the technical
expert committee to suggest additional design improvements as well as
suggestions on any layout changes in polling stations to prevent any
excessive exposure of VVPATs to illumination in future. “Manufacturers
have also been asked to do a detailed technical analysis once the VVPATs
are free from election petition (as these cannot be currently accessed
in strong rooms till 45 days election petition period is over),” it
said.

The commission has also decided to reiterate its standard
operating procedures regarding do’s and don’ts and has also formed a
committee to further examine these SOPs. It has also stated that it
would make the first level checking (FLC) process stricter and adopt
hardware improvements recommended by the TEC to prevent auto shutdown of
VVPATs due to excessive light. Further, training of the polling
officials would be strengthened and streamlined to minimise failures due
to human errors.
Former CEC, Experts Challenge Election Commission’s Theory on VVPAT Failure
Former
CEC S.Y. Quraishi, in whose term paper audits for EVM machines were
tested and introduced, questions the failure of the system in the recent
by-polls despite all-weather tests.
Former CEC S.Y. Quraishi, in
whose term paper audits for EVM machines were tested and introduced,
questions the failure of the system in the recent by-polls despite
all-weather tests.
New Delhi: The Election Commission on Friday
declared that the reason behind the malfunctioning of a large number of
voter verified paper audit trail (VVPAT) machines during the recently
held by-elections to the Kairana and Bhandara-Gondiya parliamentary
constituencies was due to the “failure of contrast sensor” and “failure
of length sensor” and that both these errors were “mainly caused by
excessive exposure to illumination in the polling station”.

However,
past and present EC officials present at a conclave on elections in
India expressed surprise at this ‘finding’, since the VVPATs have
undergone extensive tests under varying conditions in the past without
malfunctioning.

Failure despite all-weather tests surprises former CEC

Speaking
at the conclave on “EVMs, Election Funding and the Election Commission”
organised by a group of retired civil servants and armed forces
veterans at the Indian Social Institute here, former Chief Election
Commissioner S.Y. Quraishi noted with concern that VVPAT machines were
failing despite undergoing tests in all kinds of weather conditions.

More in Home
CBI’s Attempted Arrest of Kolkata Police Commissioner Was an Attack on Federalism
 
UK Home Secretary Approves Vijay Mallya’s Extradition
 
Alleged Mukul Roy-Kailash Vijayvargiya Audio Clip Casts New Cloud Over CBI’s Autonomy
 
Farmers’ Crisis: Are Loan Waivers, MSP Hikes, Assured Income the Solutions?
 
For First Farmer Cash Transfer, Modi Govt Says Aadhaar Not Necessary
Quraishi,
in whose term as CEC the testing of VVPATs had taken place from 2011
till their introduction in an election in Nagaland in September 2013,
recalled how tests had first been conducted in wet and humid  Kerala,
dry and hot Jaisalmer, the cold high-altitude of Ladakh, rain-soaked
Cherrapunji and Delhi. He said that since many machines had
malfunctioned after the first round of tests, the necessary changes were
made and they were again tested in all these five different locations.

Wondering
how the Election Commission was now saying that these machines
malfunctioned during the polls on May 28 due to heat, he said it
appeared unlikely to be the cause as these machines had been tested in
the extreme heat of Jaisalmer, which was hotter than the constituencies
where they are said to have not worked properly.

Quraishi for sampling more VVPAT votes after every poll

Quraishi
was also of the view that when it came to VVPATs, there was a need to
sample more of them after every election as the current practice of
taking the count of just one polling station in every constitutency was
too little. While the Supreme Court has not directed the EC on what
percentage of the VVPATs should be counted, Quraishi said it would be
best if the commission went for a significant percentage. “It is wrong
to say that VVPAT counting would delay the results. You can always
deploy more hands for the job to ensure that they too get counted by the
time the electronic votes are.”

Stating that the Supreme Court
has examined VVPATs, Quraishi said the EC only has to operate them. He
also suggested that the winner-loser or other contestants should be
allowed to select a few machines at random for tallying VVPAT votes.

EC assured testing of all 18 lakh VVPATs will be by in-house engineers

The
former CEC also noted that it was the EC’s decision to go for VVPAT
machines and that the Supreme Court had only asked the Centre to release
adequate funds for them. He said that  with 18 lakh machines to be
operationalised ahead of the 2019 Lok Sabha and assembly elections,
people were also wondering how they would be tested and if the job would
be outsourced. “But the EC has assured me that all the testing would be
done by in-house engineers, who too would be randomised for the
machines.”

Current practise of counting VVPAT votes of just one polling station is akin to `marginal tokenism’

Raising
questions on the reliability of the VVPATs, the convener of the Forum
for Electoral Integrity, retired IAS officer M.G. Devasahayam said the
counting of votes of these machines in just one polling station amounted
to just 0.4-0.5% of all votes polled and therefore their use was akin
to “marginal tokenism”.

He demanded that to win the confidence of
the people, a random sample of paper audit trail should be drawn from
machines from booths or polling stations which record very high or low
turnout, which have voters who are predominantly from backward castes or
minorities and the like. He also noted that the VVPAT malfunction
percentage in the by-elections was much higher than the admissible level
of 5% and stood at 20.82% for Kairana, 19.27% for Bhandara-Gondia and
13.16% for Palghar.

EC expert says VVPATs more than mere ‘thermal printers’

A
member of the technical expert committee of the EC, Rajat Moona, while
discussing the unique technical features of VVPATs, said that “they are
not only thermal printers, their print does not fade for five years
unlike those of other similar devices which become faint within a few
days”.

He also said VVPATs are “encapsulated devices” which work
independently and have different sensors which even keep a measure of
the length of its tape and ensure that it remains at 99 mm. He said the
quality of print, the contrast and the fact that every slip is supposed
to drop in the box are all monitored by the machine.

A former
director general of the Centre for Developed and Advanced Computing,
Moona said “each VVPAT machine goes through a temperature-humidity
cycle”. He said behind the recent failure of these machines were caused
by “multiple factors”, including “not enough maturity in handling them”.

These
machines, he said, had earlier been used successfully in the Punjab,
Uttar Pradesh and Gujarat assembly elections. “Yet, when they
encountered trouble the EC said ‘don’t shift them, change them’ since
there were many on standby which could be used”.

EC wants design improvements in VVPATs, training of staff

Meanwhile,
the Election Commission has asked the manufacturers and the technical
expert committee to suggest additional design improvements as well as
suggestions on any layout changes in polling stations to prevent any
excessive exposure of VVPATs to illumination in future. “Manufacturers
have also been asked to do a detailed technical analysis once the VVPATs
are free from election petition (as these cannot be currently accessed
in strong rooms till 45 days election petition period is over),” it
said.

The commission has also decided to reiterate its standard
operating procedures regarding do’s and don’ts and has also formed a
committee to further examine these SOPs. It has also stated that it
would make the first level checking (FLC) process stricter and adopt
hardware improvements recommended by the TEC to prevent auto shutdown of
VVPATs due to excessive light. Further, training of the polling
officials would be strengthened and streamlined to minimise failures due
to human errors.
Opposition wants paper ballot in 2019
A majority of opposition parties, including the Congress, have demanded a return to ballot paper.
The demand was put forth at an all-party meet convened by the Election Commission Monday to discuss electoral reforms
BJP’s opposition to it was the strongest and loudest when G.V.L. Narasimha Rao wrote a book titled Democracy at Risk! in 2010.

Subramanian Swamy even challenged these machines in the Delhi High Court and the Supreme Court.
https://news.webindia123.com/news/Articles/India/20100828/1575461.html
RSS favours paper ballots, EVMs subjected to public scrutiny

Joining
the controversy regarding the reliablity of Electronic Voting Machines
(EVMs) which have been questioned by political parties, the RSS today
asked the Election Commission (EC) to revert back to tried and tested
paper ballots and subject EVMs to public scrutiny whether these gadgets
are tamper proof. In an editorial titled ‘Can we trust our EVMs?’, The
Organiser, the RSS mouthpiece, noted it was a fact that till date an
absolutely tamper-proof machine had not been invented and credibility of
any system depends on ‘transparency, verifiability and trustworthiness’
than on blind and atavistic faith in its infallibility. The issue is
not a ‘private affair’ and it involves the future of India. Even if the
EVMs were genuine, there was no reason for the EC to be touchy about it,
the paper commented. The Government and the EC can’t impose EVMs as a
fait accompli on Indian democracy as the only option before the voter.
There were flaws like booth capturing, rigging, bogus voting, tampering
and ballot paper snatching in the ballot paper system of polling leading
the country to switch over to the EVMs and all these problems were
relevant in EVMs too. Rigging was possible even at the counting stage.
What made the ballot papers voter-friendly was that all aberrations were
taking place before the public eye and hence open for corrections
whereas the manipulations in the EVMs is entirely in the hands of powers
that be and the political appointees manning the sytem, the paper
commented. The EVM has only one advantage — ’speed’ but that advantage
has been undermined by the staggered polls at times spread over three to
four months. ‘’This has already killed the fun of the election
process,'’ the paper noted. Of the dozen General Elections held in the
country, only two were through the EVMs and instead of rationally
addressing the doubts aired by reputed institutions and experts the
Government has resorted to silence its critics by ‘intimidation and
arrests on false charges’, the paper observed, recalling the arrest of
Hyederabad-based technocrat Hari Prasad by the Mumbai Police. Prasad’s
research has proved that the EVMs were ‘vulnerable to fraud’. The
authorities want to send a message that anybody who challenges the EC
runs the risk of persecution and harassment, the RSS observed. Most
countries around the world looked at the EVMs with suspicion and
countries like the Netherlands, Italy, Germany and Ireland had all
reverted back to paper ballots shunning EVMs because they were ‘easy to
falsify, risked eavesdropping and lacked transparency’. Democracy is too
precious to be handed over to whims or an opaque establishment and
network of unsafe gizmos. ‘’For the health of Indian democracy it is
better to return to tried and tested methods or else elections in future
can turn out to be a farce,'’ the editorial said.