Time to declare EVMs’ end
The massive scale of resource waste incurred by a single project, the Election Commission's electronic voting machine (EVM) endeavour, has been outlined in a recent report by this daily. The now stagnant project began with the purchase of 1.50 lakh EVMs at a cost of Tk 3,825 crore ahead of the 2018 national polls to reduce the use of paper ballots. We are now left with 1.05 lakh out-of-order EVMs, worth Tk 2,467 crore of taxpayers' money. The machines that still remain functional have only four years of their lifespan left. But even these leftover EVMs have been haphazardly stored, the bulk of them being at the lone manufacturer's (the Bangladesh Machine Tools Factory) warehouse while the rest are stored at the EC office and at other rented houses or educational institutions across the country.
Given the current state of things, it is mindboggling how rightful resistance from experts, political parties, and the media against EVM use went ignored by the EC for years. Even in this column, we have written multiple times regarding the issue of EVM distrust, the EC's lack of forethought regarding this project, and the ultimate wastage of public money. Moreover, the very limited use of EVMs over the last few years is mired in controversy. For example, during the 2022 city corporation election in Narayanganj, voters complained about the machines being down, issues with fingerprint recognition, slow machines, and leakage of voting data. And during the Rangpur City Corporation election on December 27 that year, voting reportedly began three hours behind schedule due to complications with the EVMs, and many voters returned home without voting. Even so, the EC pushed forth with its aimless Tk 8,711 crore EVM project.
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Perhaps the EVM project would have worked out for Bangladesh under different circumstances, but we will never know because the EC remained unyielding in not heeding any criticism from experts. And now that this endeavour is choking out its last breaths, will the EC get off scot-free for so bluntly wasting public funds? We hope this won't be so, and that the commission will be held accountable for its lack of foresight. It is unacceptable that our EC went so far with a project concerning something as sensitive as voting, only to now let it go to waste.
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