Various Malpractices In Current Voting System

Posted by Neeraj Gutgutia on December 4th, 2017

Today in many democracies including India voting is conducted offline. That means voters have to visit the booths where after scrutinizing their identity they are given ballot papers where they have to cast their vote secretly. While in some places electronic voting machines are used in booths, where the voters have to press the button for the party that they want to vote. There are many flaws in these types of voting system. We shall be discussing all such malpractices in this article in detail. These flaws could be avoided only when online voting system is introduced.

Major malpractices in the voting system

• Duplicate voting:  If the officials who are involved in scrutinizing the identity of the voter is corrupt then a single voter can vote many times. Just relying on the honesty of an official is not a correct way to have a complete election process. This kind of duplicate voting can easily make an unworthy party to win and rule the country.

In case of online voting system, no such corrupt official can manipulate the identity or the votes and hence duplicate voting could be avoided completely.

• Buying the votes: Parties spend huge amount bribing the voters with cash or gifts for voting their party. At certain places, even the voters are threatening to life for voting a respective party. The question arises how the information of his voting for the other party was leaked?

Online voting process enables the highest possible security with end – to – end encryption.

• Booth capturing: Many places it was found that some party workers along with the supporters of a particular party would capture the polling stations and forced the voters to vote for their party. If online voting is adopted, then this kind of malpractices could be avoided. Because when there is no booth then there is no question of booth capturing.
• Violence: Parties practice violence against the voters who have voted for the other party. Sometimes the ruling party also uses police and other state machinery to harass adversarial candidates. Due to this violent practices government has to deploy more security official and that again adds up the cost of the total election process.
• Rigging EVMs: In the electronic voting process there is an electronic machine which contains all the details of the candidates. When a voter presses a button of the favored party symbol then the vote automatically gets saved. These machines could be tampered if the official present there is corrupt. This tampering could be done before the polling or before the counting process starts. There will be no such situation arising when online mode of voting is implied.

There are many more malpractices that occur in booth based voting system. Above dealt are only few of them. All these could be stopped only if online voting system is brought in light. Majority of flaws and violation could be stopped easily through this system and people can vote and have a reliable government.