who designed the first Indian voting machine
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India used paper ballots till the 1990s. The sheer scale of the Indian elections with more than half a billion people eligible to vote, combined with election-related criminal activity, led Indian election authority and high courts to transition to electronic voting.[2][23] According to Arvind Verma – a professor of Criminal Justice with a focus on South Asia, Indian elections have been marked by criminal fraud and ballot tampering since the 1950s. The first major election with large scale organized booth capturing were observed in 1957.[23] The journalist Prem Shankar Jha, states Milan Vaishnav, documented the booth capturing activity by Congress party leaders, and the opposition parties soon resorted to the same fraudulent activity in the 1960s.[24] A booth-capture was the phenomenon where party loyalists, criminal gangs and upper-caste musclemen entered the booth with force in villages and remote areas, and stuffed the ballot boxes with pre-filled fake paper ballots.[25][26] This problem grew between the 1950s and 1980s and became a serious and large scale problem in states such as Uttar Pradesh and Bihar,[2][23] later spreading to Andhra Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir and West Bengal accompanied with election day violence.[27] Another logistical problem was the printing of paper ballots, transporting and safely storing them, and physically counting hundreds of millions of votes.[1][23]
The Election Commission of India, led by T.N. Seshan, sought a solution by developing Electronic voting machines in the 1990s.[23][28] These devices were designed to prevent fraud by limiting how fast new votes can be entered into the electronic machine.[23] By limiting the rate of vote entered every minute to five, the Commission aimed to increase the time required to cast fake ballots, therefore, allow the security forces to intervene in cooperation with the volunteers of the competing political parties and the media.[2][23][5]
The Commission introduced other features such as EVM initialization procedures just before the elections.[7] Officials tested each machine prior to the start of voting to confirm its reliable operation in the front of independent polling agents. They added a security lock “close” button which saved the votes already cast in the device's permanent memory but disabled the device's ability to accept additional votes in the case of any attempt to open the unit or tamper.[2][20] The Commission decided to conduct the elections over several weeks in order to move and post a large number of security forces at each booth. On the day of voting, the ballots were also locked and then saved in a secure location under the watch of state security and local volunteer citizens. Additionally, the Election Commission also created a database of thumb impressions and electronic voting signatures, open to inspection by polling agent volunteers and outside observers.[2] The EVMs-based system at each booth matches the voter with a registered card with this electronic database in order to ensure that a voter cannot cast a ballot more than once.[2][5] According to Debnath and other scholars, these efforts of the Election Commission of India – developed in consultations with the Indian courts, experts and volunteer feedback from different political parties – have reduced electoral fraud in India and made the elections fairer and more competitive.[5]