Page 167 - General Election

While it is true that a 2% margin of error has been considered in the report but the
confidence level considered is also far higher at 99.993665752% (4 sigma level) than
considered by most commentators.

Similarly, the question about what to use as the population for the study?

To answer this question, it was first necessary to decide over the level at which the

statistical guarantee was required. In this case the basic unit of the study was the
EVM machine and it was required to check the working of the EVM through VVPAT
counts. It is noteworthy that all EVMs are similar, having come up through the same
manufacturing and testing process. Every machine is connected to a VVPAT. Before

poll each EVM undergoes FLC and multiple mock polls and verifications as per
established protocols in the presence of political parties. It is also to be noted that
there is no systematic bias in allotting particular EVMs to particular states /

constituency/ booths. Machines are randomized twice, first time for allocating to
assembly constituencies and second time for allocating to polling stations.

Thus, the report considered as a unit all the elections that are announced on a given
day and typically counted on the same day. This could be any combination of
assembly elections in a few states, or Lok Sabha elections along with assembly

elections and bye elections and so on. All were considered as one set of elections
and since the Statistical unit of study was the EVM, the population consisted of all
EVMs being used in a particular set of elections for which counting was done on the
same day.

However, the mandate of the Hon’ble Supreme Court to the ECI to tally five
randomly chosen VVPAT systems per assembly constituency /segment goes far
beyond the recommendation of taking a sample size of 479 as given by the expert

committee.

In fact, for the parliamentary elections, this mandate boils down to testing 20,625
randomly chosen VVPAT systems (five in each of the 4125 assembly segments). If
no mismatch in the EVM and VVPAT count is found in such a sample, then it can be

said with very high level of confidence or with near certainty that the sanctity of
the election process is not affected by the use of EVMs.

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