What is the Full Form of EVM?

EVM stands for "Electronic Voting Machine".

What is the meaning of EVM?

This machine is fairly popular in India during times of elections. The first use of these machines started and developed by the state-owned electronics corporation of Indian known by the name of Bharat Electronics in the 1990s.

It was originally introduced between the period of 1998 to 2001. Ever since it has picked up fame and now it is widely used in the state as well general elections. Before the introduction of EVMs, paper ballots were used to conduct the voting process and manual counting was done afterward. Paper ballots were criticized majorly since forging the result was an easy task, so it the concern of major protest and was asked to put a hold on this practice. Then the introduction of printed ballots was put forward, but it turned down since it was an expensive practice. Later on, EVM was introduced that had features like “electronically limiting the rate of casting the votes to five per minute", a security "lock-close" feature, an electronic database of "voting signatures and thumb impressions" to confirm the identity of the voter, conducting elections in phases over several weeks while deploying extensive security personnel at each booth have helped reduce electoral fraud and abuse, eliminate booth capturing and create more competitive and fairer elections.

Out of many benefits, one of the most promising ones is that it has read-only memory, as in it cannot be changed as per one wish.

Even after such precautions taken against the fraud propaganda still, a few political parties were able to forge with time. To this, the Supreme Court of India in 2011 directed the Election Commission to include paper trails as well to help confirm the reliable operation of EVMs.