The Election Commission of India (ECI) has attracted criticism for reducing the Voter Verified Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) based audit of Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) to an exercise in tokenism and for its lack of transparency in the matter. The uniform sample size of “five EVMs per Assembly constituency” prescribed by it for all Assembly constituencies and States does not conform to the fundamental principles of statistical sampling and leads to high margins of error.
At the same time, the ECI’s critics are also guilty of demanding arbitrary, non-statistical sample sizes like “25 per cent samples” and “50 per cent samples” for VVPAT-based audit of EVMs, under the mistaken impression that a “bigger percentage” guarantees greater accuracy of results. Some are now demanding a 100% manual count of all VVPAT voter slips.
