Supreme Court asks Centre what blocks totalisers for EVM counts

The Supreme Court on 1 September asked the Union government to state what, if anything, stops India from counting Electronic Voting Machine votes through totalisers. A bench of Chief Justice Surya Kant, Justice Joymalya Bagchi and Justice V. Mohana directed the Centre to look at the Conduct of Elections Rules, 1961, including Rule 59A, and at the Law Commission of India's 255th Report.

A totaliser would cable together the control units from about 14 polling stations and print one consolidated figure for each candidate. Booth-level tallies would no longer be public. The petitioners, including advocate Ashwini Upadhyay and Yogesh Gupta, say that is the point. Booth numbers let a candidate see which streets voted against him. They want the count declared for a whole constituency instead.

Chief Justice Kant put the question to Attorney-General R. Venkataramani in open court: what are the legal blocks, and what amendments would be needed. The bench also asked the Election Commission to send its own proposal to the Centre. The order does not introduce the machine. It forces the executive to explain why the machine is still outside the statute.

The Commission said no, and named the votes

Senior advocate Seshadhri Naidu, for the Election Commission, told the bench that three of six national parties and 18 of 29 state parties had opposed totalisers when the idea was last circulated. Only the Law Commission, in that 255th report, backed selective use.

The Commission also said neither the Representation of the People Act nor the Conduct of Election Rules contains a clause that recognises, regulates or governs a totaliser. Any move would need amendments and a rewritten counting procedure. Rule 59A already allows a form of combined counting for paper ballots in limited cases. The Law Commission proposed a similar clause for EVMs. That is the text the court has now told the Centre to examine.

The Commission's sharper warning was political rather than technical. EVMs themselves, it said, are still the subject of frequent public questioning. Introducing an unregulated extra device in that climate would create a new set of allegations. The argument is conservative: do not add a machine whose legal status is blank while the existing machine is already under suspicion.

What a totaliser would change on counting day

Under the present method, each EVM control unit is opened and counted at the assembly segment or the equivalent counting centre. Results are written booth by booth. Parties photograph the sheets. Workers then map the numbers onto caste and neighbourhood lists they already hold. That map is how post-poll pressure, and sometimes pre-poll threats, get their precision.

A 14-booth cluster would blur that map. A candidate would still know the constituency total. He would not know, from the official record, which school building or which ward produced the margin. That is the privacy claim in the petitions. The same cluster would also make a recount or a machine-wise audit slower, because the official figure would no longer sit on a single control unit. That is the verification claim on the other side.

The Commission has not published a current technical specification for an EVM totaliser. Older Election Commission notes described a device that reads several control units in sequence and prints only the combined result. Whether those units still match the machines now in use, and who would certify the cable and the printer, is part of what the Centre must now answer.

Why the timing matters

The petitions also ask for a common electoral roll for parliamentary, assembly and local body elections, on the ground that three separate rolls waste money and staff. The totaliser question was heard in that bundle. The court separated it enough to demand a specific reply on counting hardware and rules.

India has spent a decade arguing about EVMs, VVPATs and the size of the paper trail. Totalisers sit one step downstream of that fight. They do not change how a vote is recorded. They change how much of the count a neighbourhood can be blamed for. Parties that win booths they consider hostile have little reason to hide those numbers. Parties that lose them have every reason to want them hidden.

The Centre now has to say whether Rule 59A can be extended, whether a new rule is required, and whether the political opposition recorded by the Commission is a legal impediment or only a political fact. Until that affidavit arrives, booth-wise EVM sheets remain the official record of how each polling station voted.