Auditing Indian elections

Abstract

Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) used in the 2019 General Elections in India were fitted with printers to produce Voter-Verifiable Paper Audit Trails (VVPATs). VVPATs allow voters to check whether their votes were recorded as they intended. However, confidence in election results requires more: VVPATs must be preserved inviolate and then actually used to check the reported election result in a trustworthy way that the public can verify. A full manual tally from the VVPATs could be prohibitively expensive and time-consuming; moreover, it is difficult for the public to determine whether a full hand count was conducted accurately. We show how Risk-Limiting Audits (RLAs) can provide high confid..