CITIZENS’ COMMISSION ON ELECTIONS
Chairperson:- Justice (retd) Madan B. Lokur, former Supreme Court Judge
January 2021

Page No. 9-10
Post
Parliament Election-2019 there has been a sharp decline. The 2020
‘Democracy Report’ by the V-Dem Institute based at the University of
Gothenburg puts India in the league of countries who have seen
significant slides into authoritarianism. India’s democratic process is
‘on a path of steep decline’, the Report says. This has been evidenced
from the happenings over the past six years, more so during the last
year and a half when there has been a consistent manifestation of a
regressive authoritarian regime.
We also noticed that India has a
deeply flawed first-past-the-post election system where in a political
party winning just about 25% of the electorate’s mandate can capture
power by having a majority number of MPs and impose its will on the
entire population as is happening now.
We also noticed that India has
a deeply flawed first-past-the-post election system wherein a political
party winning just about 25% of the electorate’s mandate can capture
power by having a majority number of MPs and impose its will on the
entire population as is happening now. Let us look at Parliament
Election-2019 and the composition of the present Lok Sabha. For this
election, India had a total electorate of 91.05 crore out of which
67.40% voters (61.86 crore) exercised their franchise. The ruling party
(BJP) secured 37.36% of these polled votes which was 22.90 crores and
won 303 seats. If it had been proportional representation system BJP’s
seat share would have been only 201 which is far from majority.
Furthermore, if BJP’s vote share is to be taken as percentage of total
electorate it turns out to be just 25.15%. This means that in the 2019
Parliament election the current ruling dispensation received the mandate
of only one-fourth of India’s electorate.
Page No. 34-35
Under Electronic system ECI has lost control
There
is another serious dimension to this problem. Under the ballot paper
system, the ECI had full control and supervision over the manufacturing
of ballot-boxes, printing of ballot-papers its despatch and counting of
votes. Not so with EVMs. Public Sector Undertakings (PSUs) Bharat
Electronics Limited (BEL), Bengaluru, and the Electronic Corporation of
India Limited (ECIL), Hyderabad, manufacture EVMs and they are not under
the control or supervision of the ECI. Instead, they are under the
direct control of the Union Government headed by a Minister from the
ruling party. These entities share the confidential software programme
with foreign chip manufacturers to copy it on to micro-controllers used
in the EVMs. When these foreign companies deliver micro-controllers
fused with software code to the EVM manufacturers, neither the
manufacturer nor the ECI officials nor the technical advisers can read
back their contents because they are locked. What is worse, even the
PSUs seem to have lost control of EVMs on election duty and private
engineers have taken over the critical tasks of checking and maintaining
EVMs and VVPATs, starting from First Level Checking till the end of
counting. It is clear, therefore, that EVM voting does not comply with
any of the ‘democracy principles’ which are paramount.
Page No. 36
Media
source said that it had deep-dived into two sets of data shared by the
ECI: first, the voter turnout/votes polled data on the EVMs and second,
the votes counted data and had found serious discrepancies in the two
sets of data in 373 constituencies which went to polls in the first four
phases of the election. When this source raised the issue of
discrepancies with the ECI the ticker mentioning “final voter turnout”
mysteriously disappeared from the EC’s website (eciresults.nic.in). When
asked why the ticker and the data have been removed from the website,
there was no response.
Page No. 37
But, in defiance of this basic
principle, vide its letter dated February 13, 2018 the ECI directed
state chief electoral officers to mandatorily verify VVPAT paper slips
in only one randomly selected polling station in each assembly
constituency. This being around 0.5% sample size which is pathetically
low, defeated the very object of installing VVPATs in all EVMs which
tantamount to non-implementation of Supreme Court Order.
Tallying a
large number of VVPAT slips with electronic count is to convince people
of the integrity and fairness of the elections. Even without any demand,
the ECI should have done this suo-moto. Not only they did not do this
but went to the extreme extent of filing an affidavit in the Supreme
Court (based on a non-existent ISI Report) suggesting a near zero sample
size of a just 479 randomly chosen booths (out of total 10. 35 lakh
booths i.e. 0.03%). The ECI did this despite widespread public suspicion
about EVM voting and 21 opposition parties as well as civil society
seeking relief. This shows the ECI’s insincerity towards its
constitutional mandate and total disregard for elementary principles of
democracy.
“our considered view is that having regard to the totality
of the facts of the case and need to generate the greatest degree of
satisfaction in all with regard to the full accuracy of the election
results, the number of EVMs that would now be subjected to verification
so far as VVPAT paper trail is concerned would be 5 per Assembly
Constituency or Assembly Segments in a Parliamentary Constituency
instead of what is provided by Guideline No. 16.6, namely, one machine
per Assembly Constituency or Assembly Segment in a Parliamentary
Constituency…
Page No. 39
There was not a word about ‘democracy
principles’ and the ‘decision rules’ that must be followed by the ECI in
the event of discrepancies between manual counting and electronic
counting. Five VVPAT machines per Assembly constituency arbitrarily
determined by the SC just increased the sample size from microscopic
0.5% to miniscule 2% whereas we had asked for reasonable 30% and
political parties 50%!A review petition was filed against this order
with strong evidence of EVM-VVPAT fraud and malfunctioning in the first
three phases of Election-2019 as well as perjury committed by the DEC
regarding the “ISI Report”. Assembly election that followed in October
2019. Two days before the polling date, there was a video showing
Bakshish Singh Virk, BJP candidate for the Assandh constituency
addressing a campaign meeting thus:
“You will have to pay for a
five-second mistake for the next five years. We will come to know where a
person has voted. You should not have any wrong perception about it.
Many people do not tell deliberately to whom they voted, but if you ask
us who you voted for, we shall tell you that too, because Modiji’s and
Khattarji’s eyes are very sharp. May you press any of the buttons, all
the votes will go to the ‘lotus’ (BJP’s symbol) as we have fixed all the
EVMs.”
Page No. 45
Finally, is the Election Commission in full
control of the entire electoral process like the design and manufacture
of EVM/VVPAT, manufacture of microprocessor and their burning into EVM,
writing, and installation of software, counting methods, and other
technical functions as envisaged under *Article 324 of the Constitution
of India?