Citizens, Experts and Activists Demand Overhaul of India’s Electronic Voting System

New Delhi: A broad and growing collective of concerned citizens, including technical experts, legal minds, and civil society organisations, has issued a strong memorandum to the Election Commission of India (ECI), demanding an urgent and sweeping overhaul of India’s Electronic Voting System (EVS). Following a national consultation involving over 80 signatories, a nationwide campaign has been launched to demand accountability and transparency in India’s electoral processes.
The participants have raised pointed questions on why the Election Commission has failed to make crucial electoral data publicly accessible in a transparent and verifiable manner. Questions such as the absence of a searchable voter list database on the ECI website, the non-availability of Form 17C data (which records votes polled at every booth), and the lack of access to vital procedural forms related to voter roll revisions have been highlighted. These procedural omissions, they argue, not only hamper public verification but also raise serious concerns over the integrity of electoral rolls.
The memorandum also challenges the ECI’s opacity around the electronic voting machines. Why is the source code of the EVMs still not open to public inspection? Why are the contents of the Symbol Loading Unit (SLU)—used to configure each EVM—not disclosed or verified by independent technical experts? Why are VVPAT slips not counted fully, despite being the only available physical audit trail? These questions remain unanswered, and the Collective believes the reluctance to share this information signals deeper issues of credibility and technological inefficiency.
Among the most serious concerns raised is the architecture of the current EVS—what the memorandum calls a “clumsy and messy” semi-automated system. With over 10.5 lakh standalone voting machines operating without any integrated network, the absence of independent software verification or full audit trails creates potential vulnerabilities to manipulation or error. The ECI’s claim that the machines are unhackable because they are not connected to the internet does not address concerns about internal tampering or errors introduced during configuration.
The document reiterates six urgent demands to restore public trust in the voting process. These include the publication of all voter rolls—past and present—in a publicly searchable format, uploading of all Form 17C data with aggregation tools for verification, and full access to voter list revision forms. Further, the EVM source code should be made open source, the SLU contents should be disclosed and independently audited, and most critically, VVPAT slips must be handed over to voters and counted in full, with final results based on these physical records rather than the electronic tallies.
The memorandum also draws attention to the ECI’s increasing proximity to the political executive, the weakening enforcement of the Model Code of Conduct, and the growing trend of communal and divisive political rhetoric going unchecked during campaigns. Specific examples of unexplained voter list additions—such as the sudden inclusion of 37 lakh new voters before the Maharashtra assembly elections—underscore the scale of potential manipulation.
This campaign, coordinated under the banner of Vote for Democracy, has already garnered the support of eminent individuals from across disciplines: from former judges like Justice Hariparanthaman and Justice B.G. Kolse Patil to computer scientists like Madhav Deshpande and Professor Harish Karnick, and activists like Aruna Roy and Teesta Setalvad. Their collective expertise gives weight to the claims and urgency behind the memorandum.
The signatories have urged the ECI to respond in good faith and initiate open dialogue with all stakeholders—technical experts, citizen representatives, and political actors—to address the growing deficit of public trust in India's democratic process. Without systemic reforms, they warn, the electoral machinery will continue to drift further away from its constitutional mandate.