Let’s re-search Ask the elders in your family and neighbourhood about their experience of participating in elections. • Did anyone vote in the first or second general election? Who did they vote for and why? • Is there someone who has used all the three methods of voting?
Which one did they prefer? • In which ways do they find the elections of those days different from the present ones? Changing methods of voting These days we use an Electronic Voting Machine (EVM) to record voters’ preferences. But that is not how we started.
In the first general election, it was decided to place inside each polling booth a box for each candidate with the election symbol of that candidate. Each voter was given a blank ballot paper which they had to drop into the box of the candidate they wanted to vote for. About lakh steel boxes were used for this purpose. A presiding officer from Punjab described how he A sample of the ballot paper used from the third to the thirteenth general elections to Lok Sabha prepared the ballot boxes—“Each box had to have its candidate’s symbol, both inside and outside it, and outside on either side, had to be displayed the name of the candidate in Urdu, Hindi and Punjabi along with the number of the constituency, the polling station and the polling booth.
The paper seal with the numerical description of the candidate, signed by the presiding officer, had to be inserted in the token frame and its window closed by its door which had to be fixed in its place at the other end by means of a wire. All this had to be done on the day previous to the one fixed for polling. To fix symbols and labels the boxes had first to be rubbed with sandpaper or a piece of brick. I found that it took about five hours for six persons, including my two daughters, to complete this work.
All this was done at my house.” Electronic Voting Machine After the first two elections, this method was changed. Now the ballot paper carried the names and symbols of all the candidates and the voter was required to put a stamp on the name of the candidate they wanted to vote for. This method worked for nearly forty years. Towards the end of 1990s the Election Commission started using the EVM.
By the entire country had shifted to the EVM.