The Citizens’ Commission on Elections (CCE), a civil society group, said on Saturday that the Election Commission of India must optimise the tallying of voter-verified paper audit trails (VVPATs) with the EVMs in the polls in upcoming elections.

Retired IAS officer Jawhar Sircar, a former chief electoral officer, addressed a news meet on behalf of the CCE, whose members include former Supreme Court judges, civil servants, journalists, economists and academics.

“There is no proof that EVMs cannot be tampered with. Hence, the only solution... is to ensure that as many VVPATs as possible are tallied with EVMs,” he said.

Four states — Bengal, Assam, Tamil Nadu and Kerala — and the Union Territory of Puducherry are going to polls later this year.

Sircar referred to the ECI’s decision before the 2019 Lok Sabha polls to tally one VVPAT per Assembly constituency. Many political parties had moved the Supreme Court opposing this small sample size.

The apex court ruled that five VVPATs for every Assembly constituency should be tallied with EVMs to ensure maximum transparency. However, the CCE does not agree.

Sircar said that in an Assembly constituency with hundreds of booths, counting merely five VVPATs would not reflect the whole picture.

“We have seen in Madhya Pradesh during the 2019 polls that the number of votes cast and recorded didn’t match. This happened in over 200 booths,” Sircar said.

Sircar was the chief electoral officer of Bengal in 1999, when EVMs were first introduced. However, on Saturday Sircar said that there had been little technical upgrade in EVMs over the past 22 years.

The CCE has prepared a report where it has discussed how EVMs can allegedly be tampered with. It will share the report with the ECI, the President of India and relevant government departments.

Recently, former chief election commissioner of India S.Y. Quraishi argued in favour of cent per cent VVPAT counting. Quraishi, in a webinar, said that counting both VVPATs and EVMs takes barely 20-25 minutes, hence all VVPATs must also be counted.

Sircar endorsed Quraishi. “The ECI argued that counting of all VVPATS would be a long-drawn process. From my experience as a CEO, I can say it won’t take more than 20 minutes to count a VVPAT,” he said.

Subhashis Banerjee, a professor of computer science in IIT-Delhi who joined the news meet virtually, said EVMs could be hacked through electromagnetic and other devices from a remote location.

Against such a backdrop, the CCE believes the only way to ensure maximum transparency in polls would be to count as many VVPATs as possible.