With the Karnataka government deciding to go for paper ballots for the upcoming local body elections, forgoing electronic voting machines or EVMs, the State Election Commission (SEC) faces challenges in conducting a free and fair exercise.
The Congress-ruled state’s decision is not only aligned with the party’s national campaign to return to paper ballots, but also follows the allegations the party’s central leadership made against the Election Commission of India (ECI) for ‘manipulation’ of the poll process.
It is now incumbent on the SEC, an independent body, to show that it can prepare a voters’ list free of manipulation and conduct paper polling free of discrepancy.
Ever since the Lok Sabha polls last year—and more stridently after the Haryana and Maharashtra assembly elections that followed—the Congress has intensified its campaign charging the ECI of helping the BJP “steal” elections through manipulation of electoral rolls and EVMs.
Now, given the Karnataka government’s decision, among the first responsibilities of the SEC would be to prepare the rolls of the state’s 5.52 crore electors, as per a 2025 revision. A clean roll is vital for any democracy; it should ensure that no genuine voter is left out of the system. In this regard, while announcing the state cabinet decision to go for paper ballots, law minister H K Patil pointed out: “The cabinet has decided to authorise the SEC to prepare, revise, and, if required, redo the electoral rolls for these polls.”
So far, the SEC was using the electoral roll available with the ECI to conduct the local polls. “Now, to conduct all local body elections, the state cabinet will recommend amendments for revision, correction and reconstitution of the voters’ list, so that the SEC can prepare a high-quality electoral roll,” Patil added.
The voters’ list is indeed a matter of greater concern than the EVM. The allegation of roll manipulation is levelled in almost every state and hardly any party is left untarred by such charges. It is the ECI’s duty to prepare the final, error-free list because the buck stops with the constitutional body in a general election. However, the political parties need to share the blame too, because they need to carry out their duty of verifying the list properly.
The ECI sends the electoral roll twice a year to the political parties to check and recommend deletions or additions. As per the current procedure and calendar of events, the parties are asked to verify the rolls once when the draft rolls are out in October, and again in January when the final list is published. The parties must question themselves whether they have carried out this task rigorously.
Why does the roll become so important? Consider the two recent allegations related to Karnataka made by Congress leaders. In a highly publicised press meet, Rahul Gandhi highlighted what he called a manipulation of the voters’ list; as an example, he showed a copy of the roll containing some 80 voters residing in a single one-room tenement in the Mahadevapura assembly segment of the Bangalore Central Lok Sabha constituency. He also said that in many other cases, the house number of the voter is given as ‘0’ and the name of the voter’s father as ‘ABCDEF’ or something like that.
B R Patil, MLA from Aland in Kalaburagi district, has claimed the ECI has not responded to repeated requests by the Karnataka criminal investigation department to give details of the applications that sought the deletion of about 6,000 allegedly forged names from the voters’ list in his constituency in the 2023 assembly election. He said all these were his supporters and there was a conspiracy to delete their names to ensure his defeat—something he came to know by accident. Patil won by 10,348 votes in 2023; he had lost in 2018 by a mere 697 votes.
These examples highlight the importance of the voters’ list. And need for the Karnataka government and SEC to take all available measures to ensure that the local body polls are fool-proof.
As regards EVMs, over the past couple of decades, high courts and the Supreme Court have dealt with petitions that questioned the use of EVMs and requested a return to paper ballots. Every time, the courts upheld the use of EVMs, saying they cannot be hacked, and ruled out use of paper ballots.
Former Chief Election Commissioners such as Navin Chawla, S Y Qureshi (both appointed by Congress-led governments) and O P Rawat (appointed by a BJP-led government) have strongly refuted claims that EVMs can be hacked. The ECI gave more than one opportunity to political parties to come to the Election Commission headquarters to examine EVMs with their own technicians, but the parties did not accept the gauntlet. Only Janata Party president Subramanian Swamy visited and demanded the installation of VVPATs (voter-verifiable paper audit trails) to the EVMs. The latest legal challenge on EVMs was decided in November 2024, when the Supreme Court again junked a petition seeking a return to paper ballots.
Thus, there is more than one reason the Karnataka local body polls will be watched with keen interest. From a pilot run in a few Kerala polling booths in 1982 to nationwide use in 2004, EVMs have come a long way. It remains to be seen whether they turn another corner in Karnataka this time.
B S Arun | Senior journalist based in Bengaluru
(Views are personal)