What is your view on the use of ballot papers instead of EVMs again?
Dr. KA Paul is Andhra Pradesh born and now settled in USA and is an Indian evangelist and politician with little influence in Andhra Pradesh. He is the founder of the US-based organizations Global Peace Initiative (GPI) and Gospel to the Unreached Millions (GUM).
This religious man initiated a PIL in Supreme Court in November 2024 seeking the use of ballot papers as often loosing party blames the EVM for the loss. The question is why these religious people backed by foreign funds are interfering in the Indian democratic process? Why these religious leaders give reference of USA, UK, France, Belgium etc. doing election under ballot paper when most of these countries are too small in terms of population as compared to India. Why these religious leaders don’t look at West Bengal’s panchayat election violence when conducted with ballot papers where ballot boxes were looted, dumped in ponds etc.
PM Indira Gandhi did electoral malpractice using ballot papers and had to impose emergency when judiciary tried to jail her for electoral malpractice. PM Rajiv Gandhi in late 1980s ensured a rigged ballot paper based J&K election that led to National Conference Farooq Abdullah government and subsequent start of militancy in 1989.
It is important to understand the logistics issue of conducting election in a populous country like India where a general election is staggered over two months with 7-8 rounds. Every election has to be supported by vast pool of security forces (state police, central reserve police and home guards). When ballot boxes are used, even a 100 strong security forces cannot prevent violence like booth capturing by 5000 political goons. These kind of booth capturing used to happen in 1970s and 1980s and this is the reason EVMs were introduced.
It is important to understand how election results were covered by the media when counting was done manually for ballot papers. Do you remember these Doordarshan news readers during 1980s era?
As the manual counting of ballot papers were painfully slow, the state broadcaster Doordarshan used to broadcast 3-4 Bollywood films everyday till late night. In between, a brief 5 minutes election result update was flashed every hour. This process continued for 15-20 days and Bollywood film lovers remained glued to their mostly black and white TV sets. After 7-10 days the election result trends become clear but these days with EVM, election result trend becomes clear within couple of hours and by end of the day final results were declared. In those days, the final result used to come after 20 days of continuous ballot paper counting.
Now the million dollar question is, can this manual process be done now in 2020s? Do we have that large pool of security forces to control political goons who run amok at voting centre. In 1980s and 1990s, for each day of election, 80-100 people used to die during poll violence in Bihar and Bengal. In Bihar, the fight was between upper castes like Bhumihar and lower castes while in Bengal it used to be a field day for communist goons of Jyoti Basu. Poll violence is still there in Bengal but reduced considerably now due to huge presence of central security forces.
Do we have large pool of govt. employees for counting of ballot paper based votes? India’s population in 2020s is more than doubled what used to be in 1970s. So, do we have the logistics to count 100 crore manually votes in 7 days? How much cost escalation will happen with ballot paper based system? Maybe the cost will increase 5 times more. Who will bear this cost escalation? General tax payers? What about the environmental cost of printing so much ballot papers?
And please never compare with Indian election process with small countries like Belgium, Netherland, Sweden etc. The need of the hour is to expose these anti-national leftist-Islamist-Catholic Church based anarchists who want a chaotic system to continue in India to defame India as a failed democracy with human rights violation.
The Supreme Court has rightly rejected this evangelist KA Paul’s PIL but should have imposed a hefty fine of Rs 20 lakhs as done in case of Bollywood film star Juhi Chawla who brought PIL to stop 5G telecom tower installations in India. Ballot paper based all-India election is no longer practical.
P.S. -This post is neither spam nor plagiarised material and follows Quora policy
Picture source: Google / Respective rightful owner
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