A petition admitted by the Supreme Court last month that called for the introduction of technology to allow blind voters to verify their votes has set off a debate, with some disability rights activists raising concerns over the practical issues that may crop up.
On September 23, the apex court admitted the petition filed by Mumbai-based activist Akshay Bajad that suggested that image text to speech (ITTS) conversion software be added to the Electronic Voting Machines and Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) units used for elections. The court ordered notices to be sent to the respondents, the Election Commission of India and the Law Ministry, to be replied by October 21.
Dr. Bajad, an ayurvedic doctor by profession, said he had first written to the Election Commission of India (ECI) and the Union Law Ministry last year with his suggestions, but decided to file the petition as there hadn’t been any significant progress. In a Right to Information reply to him on July 4 about the status of his representations, the EC said they were “still under consideration”.
The petition sought directions to the ECI and Union Law Ministry to embed ITTS software into EVMs “so as to ensure that voters with sight disability can exercise their right to vote in an autonomous and independent manner with the means of verification of the vote cast by them”. The petition called for a mechanism to ensure that blind voters can exercise their right to vote on the same footing as those without disabilities. It added that presently a blind voter could vote with the help of a companion who would be able to read the VVPAT slip or vote on their own using the Braille signs on the EVM, but not be able to verify the vote. This, the petition said, raised issues of autonomy and secrecy.
Mr. Bajad submitted in an annexure to the petition that the ITTS device could be automated to activate itself once the voter casts the vote and the VVPAT prints the slip. This, he said, could be done by having a camera that senses the motion of the paper trail and then activates the optical character recognition (OCR), which is the conversion of images of text into machine-encoded text. The text would then be converted to speech that could be heard by the voter through headphones, he suggested. However, he added that the EC was best placed to decide what kind of technology was optimal and feasible.
Reacting to the developments, Santosh Kumar Rungta, the general secretary of the National Federation of the Blind, said though the idea was “noble”, there were some “practical concerns”, including technical issues with the text-to-speech conversion software that users face on computers and smartphones.
“There should be intensive analysis of any technology being proposed. The introduction of such technology should not mean that blind voters cannot take an escort along with them, as we do right now,” he said.
Dr. Satendra Singh, a physician with a government hospital and founder of the group Doctors with Disabilities, said his experience as a presiding officer during the 2019 Lok Sabha polls in South Delhi had been that the VVPAT was effective and claims of tampering were false. He said the ITTS option would not address voters with sensory dual disabilities (deafblind), though the option of postal ballots was available to persons with disabilities.
“Feasibility is the key here, since India is a large country and it may not be practically possible until artificial intelligence is used,” he said.
Another activist, Vaishnavi Jayakumar of the Disability Rights Alliance, said: “Text-to-speech would still exclude deafblind voters and for so-called audit purposes, as long as any citizen raises an alarm in case of malfunctioning machines, that failsafe is enough.”
“Losing candidates routinely give tampering as an excuse. But if machines malfunction, then it will be caught by voting day pre-poll demo in which all candidates’ representatives are present. There are far bigger accessibility and inclusion battles to be fought by and for disabled citizens in the electoral process,” she said.
