Messenger As Mandate

What if the EVM could approximate voter behaviour?

Over 1.74 lakh EVMs store fate of 8,500 candidates of five states — Fool the people, keep them hungry and jobless, tread cruelly on promises made, decimate earnings and savings and then quietly doctor the EVM. And bingo! Whichever button is pressed, the endorsement turns green, saffron or red. (File photo)

Your cheeky editorial about the speaking, pontificating, buttoned-up voting machine (‘I, EVM,’ IE December 12) gets it mostly right except that one, nagging doubt: If the EVM can be spoken on behalf of, can it not be thought-controlled too? The editorial claims that the EVM is, after all, the messenger of people’s will and not the will itself. Is it?

What if, just what if, the EVM has grown a sense of the self? What if it has developed something akin to anthropoid greed? What if it has discovered the august company of Cambridge Analytica and can approximate voter behaviour and choice? If nothing else, are we to believe that it does not savour its 15 minutes of infamy when it malfunctions and all hell breaks loose? Are we to believe it does not like the attention when political specimens of every gene clamour for its blood? Are we to believe that the on-air surgeries performed on it are not akin to adrenalin-pushing, TRP-bursting game-shows?

Who does not like all this? If the EVM behaves well, acts as per the book, causes no storm over the South Block tea-cup, will the gentile and the Jew ever rave about it on social media? Oh no, dear editor, no one talks about a good citizen these days. Otherwise, why was everyone on their toes when there was a power failure and the hawk-eye of the CCTV went missing for 76 minutes in a Bhopal strongroom on December 7? All the efficient donkey’s work that the Good Joe EVM performed over the days of the elections, all the silent transportation, all the winkless hours of standing in attendance in darkened rooms have gone unnoticed. But a brief error of 76 minutes has raised everyone’s heckles. Nothing sells like notoriety or why pay the trolls?

After all, there is merit in tinkering and tailoring the EVM. One little displacement in the network of cables and chips inside can be oh so fulfilling! Fool the people, keep them hungry and jobless, tread cruelly on promises made, decimate earnings and savings and then quietly doctor the EVM. And bingo! Whichever button is pressed, the endorsement turns green, saffron or red.