All you need to know about Electronic Voting Machine (EVM).

                 “Voting is our birthright and we should not miss it.” We should do the voting whenever we get a chance because the future of our country depends on us, whether we vote or not. We all know that voting is done on Electronic Voting Machine which is also known as EVM. We have to press the button to whom we have to vote.

           Do you know-how does the EVM function? On what principles does it work? How are the votes counted in EVM? Well, let’s see today that how EVM works and functions.

           Electronic Voting Machine (EVM) is used to cast the vote for any election like Central, State, Gram panchayat, etc without showing the identity of the voter. Before EVM came we used to vote on ballots. It took so much time to count the votes. Also, many of the votes were disqualified because of the wrong signature or some other defect. So, to reduce the time of counting votes and reduce the disqualification of votes EVM was invented. Till now 31 countries tried EVM or they studied EVM. Out of which only 4 countries are there who use the EVM in whole nation for election and 11 countries use in some parts of the country. 3 countries discontinued using EVM. Brazil was the first country to use EVM for voting.

                The use of EVMs and electronic voting was developed and tested by the state-owned Electronics Corporation of India and Bharat Electronics in the 1990s. They were gradually introduced in the Indian elections between 1998 and 2001. The electronic voting machines have been used in all general and state assembly elections in India since 2014.

            EVM the machine makes use of the principle that chosen option gets recorded with respective voter ID. Some machines are neutral to the voter ID and only record the vote.

            EVM is designed such that it has two units. The first one is the control unit and the second one is the balloting unit. The Control unit is kept with the governing officer which is appointed by the Election Commission of India which is an autonomous constitutional authority responsible for administering election processes in India. The balloting unit is kept in the voting section where the voter will vote for their candidate. Both the units are connected by cable. This is done to verify the identity of a voter by the governing officials. In place of a ballot paper, the governing officer will open the voting window of the balloting unit for some seconds so that he can vote for the candidate in the given time. The list of candidates, their symbols will be available where they can press the button which will be in front of the name of every candidate.

                VVPAT machine is used for the counting of votes. The VVPAT machine prints a slip that contains the name of the candidate and the corresponding election symbol. It is then automatically dropped in the sealed box. With the use of this, there is no problem with the disqualification of votes because of the signature. On the counting day, the counting officer will open the sealed box and will just count the votes. He does not need to check the signature and all because of VVPAT.

Many people think that the EVM machine can be used to tamper the votes. Well, this may happen if any EVM machine is preprogrammed and the code of voting is changed. But the important thing is that we don’t know which machine is going in which region. So, the tampering of votes becomes almost impossible. This is the good thing about EVM.

This is all about Electronic Voting Machine. I wish that everyone should vote so that we can decide the future of our country.