When the Ballot Paper Doesn’t Save You

For years, Congress and several allies have argued that the real problem in Indian elections is the electronic voting machine, and that the remedy is to go back to paper. This week the party got to test that claim. In the Legislative Council elections for 28 seats across Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, Bihar and Karnataka, Congress won only one, down from four. These polls were held on ballot papers, the very system the party has been demanding, not EVM. In Karnataka, the BJP-JD(S) alliance took all four teachers’ and graduates’ seats, including Bengaluru Teachers’, where a sitting Congress MLC lost. Chief Minister D K Shivakumar said the party would accept the verdict and review it. That is a measured response, and it sits awkwardly beside a rally that insists elections are being stolen. 

The point is simple. If EVMs were what cost Congress its elections, the party should have done better with them taken out. It did not. The prime minister has made the same point publicly. He asked how many seats Congress won when voting was on ballot papers. 

The argument keeps changing: Congress’s complaint has moved from EVM tampering to voter-roll revision and now to the Chief Election Commissioner himself. Each time, the evidence has been thinner than the rhetoric. When Congress candidates in Haryana raised battery-level complaints in 2024, the EC said the machines are checked at several stages in front of candidates’ agents and cannot be tampered with. Courts have also looked at the opposition’s EVM-related demands more than once. In 2019 the Supreme Court declined to expand VVPAT slip verification beyond the increase it had already ordered. The opposition had sought verification of 50 per cent of slips.

Selective trust in institutions: A critical commentary on the “vote chori” campaign argues that when Congress wins elections in Telangana and Kerala, the CEC is treated as a man of integrity, and when it loses elsewhere he is accused of engineering the result. An institution that is credible only when you win is not being criticised on principle. The same commentary notes that after an INDIA bloc delegation met the President on October 9, Gandhi said she had asked the opposition for evidence of its allegations, and that no such proof has been publicly presented. Slogans are not evidence, and the party’s most serious claims need to be tested in court, not on television. 

A scapegoat for organisational weakness: The council results are a reminder that voters in these constituencies, teachers and graduates, are among the most informed in the country. The prime minister himself said the outcome shows how well informed they are. Losing among them points to problems of candidate selection, alliance arithmetic and local organisation, not to a stolen mandate. The BJP and JD(S) coordinated their efforts and won. Congress did not. 

What to do: Anyone with a real grievance should file it in the proper forum and show the data. The courts exist for this, and so do the EC’s own complaint mechanisms. Demanding the CEC’s resignation and a return to paper ballots without proof only erodes public trust in elections, which is the one thing a competitive democracy cannot afford to lose.

Congress’s EVM and CEC attacks have run into an awkward result

After all this, still Congress and its allies would reject this reasoning on various grounds. First, teachers’ and graduates’ constituencies are small, specialised electorates, so a loss there says little about EVMs in general elections. Second, the current campaign is mainly about voter-roll deletions and the CEC’s independence, not EVMs. Jairam Ramesh says ECI data shows over ten crore Indians risk losing their right to vote. Third, Kharge says the ECI has stonewalled information the Karnataka CID needs for its probe into forged voter deletions. The EC has dismissed such allegations as baseless. In the process of SIR, some of the excluded voters can be included in the electoral roll. Those questions are answered by a council election result either way.