The PTI government has announced, after proposing this several times before, that the next election would be held using Electronic Voting Machines. There has been no positive response from the opposition on this matter, despite invitations from the government to discuss the issue and to examine the machines, a model of which has been placed in parliament. The opposition continues to oppose electronic voting on the basis that it believes it could become easier to rig an election using these machines. The argument runs on either side. The government is correct when it says that the repeated complaints of rigging in our polls need to be tackled. The question is whether EVMs are the best way of solving the issue.
The fact is that, while EVMs have been in use in other parts of the world for a considerable period of time, there has also been controversy over their use. In Pakistan, this would be especially true given the large number of voters who are not literate when it comes to technology, as well as the fact that electronic voting is also to be extended to overseas Pakistanis, raising new issues of concern. In the US, Virginia voting observers complained that the touchscreen EVMs in use in that state were not understood by people and did not always yield accurate results. There were also complaints about electronic voting in other states, including Ohio and Pennsylvania. The same problem has been noted in other countries and at this stage the question arises as to whether it would be wise to introduce electronic voting in what is already a strongly divided political reality.
Electronic voting or any changes in the voting mechanism currently in use should ideally come out only after a consensus between all stakeholders and all major political parties. In the absence of this, there will certainly be accusations that voting machines were used to rig or fix the result through technical means. In fact, this has happened before, during the 1990s, when political parties alleged that centralised control of voting and the calculation of results in a fixed location led to electronic fixing of the results. Such allegations continued into the Musharraf era when parties contesting polls charged that ‘ghost’ polling stations had been created electronically. The problem then is one that needs to be looked into seriously. If the political opposition continues to oppose the machines, perhaps they can be left aside until there is consensus, and instead we can focus on fixing loopholes in the current voting system.