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Electronic voting is the standard means of conducting elections using Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) in India. The system was developed for the Election Commission of India by state-owned Electronics Corporation of India and Bharat Electronics. Starting in the late 1990s, they were introduced in Indian elections in a phased manner.
Prior to the introduction of electronic voting, paper ballots were used and manual counting was done. The printed paper ballots were expensive, required substantial post-voting resources and time to count individual ballots and were prone to fraudulent voting with pre-filled fake ballots. Introduction of EVMs have brought down the costs significantly, reduces the time of counting to enable faster announcement of results and eliminated fraudulent practices due to safety features such as security locking, limits to rate of voting per minute and verification of thumb impressions. EVMs are stand-alone machines that use write once read many memory. They are self-contained, battery-powered and do not need any networking capability. They do not have any wireless or wired components that connect to the internet.
Various opposition parties at times have alleged faulty EVMs after they failed to defeat the incumbent. In 2011, the Supreme Court of India directed the Election Commission to include a paper trail to help confirm the reliable operation of EVMs. The Election Commission developed EVMs with voter-verified paper audit trail (VVPAT) which was trialed in the 2014 Indian general election. After the 2019 ruling by the Supreme Court, EVMs with accompanying VVPAT are used in all the elections with a small percentage (2%) of the VVPATs verified to ensure the reliability before certifying the final results.
The Election Commission of India has also claimed that the machines, system checks, safeguard procedures, and election protocols are tamper-proof. To mitigate any doubts regarding the hardware, prior to the election day, a sample number of votes for each political party nominee are entered into each machine, in the presence of polling agents and at the end of this sample trial run, the votes counted and matched with the entered sample votes, to ensure that the machine's hardware has not been tampered with, it is operating reliably and that there were no hidden votes pre-recorded in each machine.