What is VVPAT?

• The Election Commission shall deploy Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) along with Electronic Voting Machine (EVM) at every polling station in the general elections to Legislative Assemblies in states of Assam, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, West Bengal and UT of Puducherry to enhance the transparency and credibility of the election process.

• The Election Commission has completed the first round of randomisation of EVMs and paper trail devices to be used in the April 9 elections in Assam, Kerala and Puducherry.

• The EVMs are allotted to their respective polling stations through a two-stage randomisation process.

• In the first stage, the EVMs are randomly allocated from district-level warehouses to the Assembly constituencies. 

• In the second stage, the EVMs are randomly allocated from the Assembly level to the polling stations.

• The first randomisation was done using the EVM management system (EMS) by the district election officers in the presence of representatives from national and state-recognised political parties.

• Randomisation has also been completed for the Assembly bypolls in Goa, Karnataka, Nagaland and Tripura, to be held on April 9.

What is VVPAT? 

• The government of India notified the amended Conduct of Elections Rules, 1961 on August 14, 2013, enabling the Commission to use VVPAT with EVMs. 

• Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) was first introduced on September 4, 2013 in the byelection for Noksen Assembly Constituency of Nagaland. 

• VVPAT is an independent system attached with the EVMs that allows the voters to verify that their votes are cast as intended. When a vote is cast, a slip is printed on the VVPAT printer containing the serial number, name and symbol of the candidate and remains exposed through a transparent window for seven seconds. Thereafter, this printed slip automatically gets cut and falls in a sealed drop box of the VVPAT.

• The voter cannot take it home.

• The specially designed thermal paper used in the VVPAT is capable of retaining the printout for more than five years, so that the printout is available for manual verification by the court,if required in need of a dispute for cross checking the counting of votes cast.

• In April 2019, the Supreme Court directed the Election Commission to verify VVPAT paper slips from randomly selected five polling stations in every constituency.