An AI-Powered VVPAT Counter for Elections in India
This addresses a critical issue for election authorities in India by making VVPAT verification more efficient, though it appears incremental as it automates an existing process.
The paper tackles the bottleneck of physical verification of Voter Verified Paper Audit Trails (VVPATs) in Indian elections by proposing an automated counter using image processing and machine learning to speed up the process, enabling potential scaling to 100% of machines.
The Election Commission of India has introduced Voter Verified Paper Audit Trail since 2019. This mechanism has increased voter confidence at the time of casting the votes. However, physical verification of the VVPATs against the party level counts from the EVMs is done only in 5 (randomly selected) machines per constituency. The time required to conduct physical verification becomes a bottleneck in scaling this activity for 100% of machines in all constituencies. We proposed an automated counter powered by image processing and machine learning algorithms to speed up the process and address this issue.