The machines that tell more than just a few tales

MUMBAI: The real winner of Election 2004 was the Electronic Voting Machine (EVM). Apart from ensuring a smooth counting process the little boxes provided political parties with accurate information about voting patterns in different segments in the city.
In the days of manual voting, when the ballots of an entire constituency were mixed in a huge carton before being counted, there was no accurate method of telling how a particular area had voted.
Now, the EVM with its booth-wise voting figures provides this information on a platter. What’s more, the ballot breakup makes it possible to pin the blame on workers in areas where the party performed poorly and did not get the expected votes.
For the Shiv Sena-BJP combine, which faced a severe and intriguing drubbing in the city, this information s can be used to avoid a repetition of its dismal performance in the assembly elections scheduled for September.
The Shiv Sena has asked its Lok Sabha candidates to hand over their EVMbased analysis to assembly candidates once the names are finalised. “The boothwise information will be very useful for the assembly elections,’’ says Subhash Desai of the Sena. “The new candidates can get a better perspective for their campaigns.’’
The BJP is also trying to discern why its poll calculations went awry in the state. Says Nitin Gadkari, a former BJP minister, “We are in the process of analysing the EVM data. It will be valuable in helping us evolve proper poll strategies.’’
The EVM has also knocked down some fondly held beliefs. For instance, although Prakash Paranjpe’s campaign saw a good turnout at Mumbra and Kausa in the Thane constituency, booth-wise numbers showed that the Shiv Sena candidate barely got any votes from the 100 booths in the Muslim-dominated area.
“I thought I’d get a good number of votes from this area, but I did not get past three digits at any booth. In fact, I got zero votes from one booth, and in another, the NCP polled 460 out of 472 votes.’’
His inference: Muslims voted en masse for the NCP while slums voted 50:50 for both candidates. Based on information coming in, the BJP too has worked out a preliminary hypothesis that the party lost the slum vote in Mumbai.
Says Atul Bhatkalkar of the BJP, “While the middle class voted for us all over the city, slums voted en bloc for Congress.’’
Others like Kirit Somaiya and RamNaik of the BJP are busy corroborating their political savvy with the EVM’s statistical truth.
Dinanath Tiwari, who handled Somaiya’s campaign, says the parties always form a tentative theory after elections about who voted for them and who didn’t. “Then we talk about the whys and wherefores and aim to woo that segment which is not with us,’’ he says. “This time, we can easily confirm or reject these theories thanks to the EVM.’’