The government has agreed to release 3,000 crores to buy new electronic voting machines that print a paper receipt for each vote cast. The decision comes as opposition parties have attacked the machines currently in use as being vulnerable to rigging and is expected to be announced by Finance Minister Arun Jaitley later today.
In 2013, the Supreme Court said that the Election Commission must introduce the new machines called VVPATs (machines with Voter-Verified Paper Audit Trail) in phases. The next general election in 2019 is to be run, on the court’s orders, entirely with these upgraded machines, but the Election Commission has warned that it is running out of time to place orders for VVPATs.
Last week, the Supreme Court asked the Election Commission and the centre to explain the delay in switching to VVPATs which function like this: when a button is pushed to choose a candidate on a voting machine, a slip of paper shows the party symbol of the candidate selected. The receipt is visible to the voter for a few seconds before it drops into a sealed box.
