The first day of voting is dotted with flaws in electronic voting machines

The general election has just started and reports of malfunctions of the Electronic Voting Machine (EVM) are making a buzz from multiple corners of the country. Butchirajupalem in Visakhapatnam and Cooch Behar in West Bengal were one of the first constituencies to stop voting because the EVMs didn't work.

One of the polling places in Ghaziabad in Uttar Pradesh and two booths in Hyderabad, Telangana, are also reported to be facing problems with their electronic voting machines a little later.

But most of the malfunctions in the EVM are reported in Odisha and Andhra Pradesh.

In Andhra Pradesh, Telugu Desam Party and the Y SR Congress Party (YSRCP) are reporting EVM malfunctions. YSRCP reports that up to 99 of the voting booths are not working.

And if it was not enough for the EVMs to crash on their own, a member of the Jana Sena party was arrested for attempting to destroy one of the voting machines in the constituency of the Guntakal Assembly in the Anantapur district of Andhra Pradesh.

The concern of EVMs

The EVMs have faced a lot of controversy in India. There have been many claims that machines are vulnerable to being hacked and have security problems. It is one of the reasons why the Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) was brought into action. It allows voters to verify that their vote was recorded correctly.

Even the Supreme Court, in trying to increase confidence in the electoral process, has called for a random audit of polling stations to increase from one to five.