Consider the following Election Reforms in India and arrange them in correct chronological order starting from earliest to the last.
1. Voters photo identity card
2. Electronic voting machine
3. Voter

Question

Consider the following Election Reforms in India and arrange them in correct chronological order starting from earliest to the last.
1. Voters photo identity card
2. Electronic voting machine
3. Voter verifiable paper audit trail
4. NOTA
Select the correct answer from the code given below :
Code :

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — D, 2, 1, 4, 3 — the electronic voting machine first, then the voter's photo identity card, then NOTA, then the voter verifiable paper audit trail. The electronic voting machine is the oldest of the four by more than a decade. It was first tried in May 1982, in the by-election to the Paravur assembly constituency in Kerala, in a limited number of polling stations. The Supreme Court then held that the law as it stood did not permit voting by machine, so Parliament amended the Representation of the People Act, 1951 to authorise it — the amendment was passed in December 1988 and came into force in March 1989. EVMs were used in all 543 parliamentary constituencies for the first time in the 2004 general election. The elector's photo identity card, the EPIC, came next: it was introduced in 1993, during T. N. Seshan's tenure as Chief Election Commissioner, as the Commission's answer to impersonation and bogus voting. That fixes the first half of the sequence as 2 then 1, and rules out both options that begin with the identity card. NOTA and the VVPAT both belong to 2013, and that is where the question is really decided. The Supreme Court held on 27 September 2013 that a voter's right to register a 'none of the above' vote must be given effect, and NOTA appeared on ballots nationwide from the very next round of polls — the assembly elections of November-December 2013 — drawing about 1.1 per cent of the vote, over six million votes, in the 2014 general election; the distinct NOTA symbol followed on 18 September 2015. The paper audit trail took far longer to become a fact of Indian voting. It was first used in September 2013 in the Noksen assembly by-election in Nagaland, ran as a pilot in only 8 of 543 constituencies in the 2014 general election, and reached all 543 constituencies only in the 2019 general election. Measured by when each became a general feature of Indian elections, NOTA precedes the VVPAT — which is the order the commission's key marks. One honest caveat a careful student should know: that single Noksen pilot in early September 2013 does technically predate the 27 September NOTA judgment by a few weeks, so the two 2013 reforms are close enough that the tie-break depends on whether you date a reform from its first pilot or from its general adoption. UPPSC's key uses general adoption, and on that reading option (d) is the answer.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) Gets the opening pair right — the machine of 1982 before the identity card of 1993 — and then reverses the tail, putting the paper audit trail before NOTA. On the reading the commission's key uses, that is backwards: NOTA was available in every constituency from the assembly elections of November-December 2013 onwards, whereas the VVPAT was still a pilot in 8 of 543 seats in 2014 and only covered the whole country in 2019. This is the most attractive of the wrong options, because a candidate who knows the first half cold may not have thought about how to separate two reforms that share a year.  (b) This is the 'answer in the order the items are printed' option, and it is wrong at both ends. It puts the voter's photo identity card of 1993 ahead of the electronic voting machine, which was already being tried in Kerala in May 1982 and had statutory backing from March 1989 — an eleven-year error. It then repeats the mistake of option (a) by placing the paper audit trail ahead of NOTA.  (c) Gets the tail exactly right — NOTA and then the paper audit trail — but opens with the identity card before the voting machine. The EPIC belongs to 1993 and Seshan's tenure as Chief Election Commissioner; the EVM was tried a full decade earlier, in the Paravur by-election of May 1982. Because the question is decided by two independent pairings, getting one pair right is not enough.

Concept: Four separate reforms have reshaped how an Indian vote is cast and counted, and each entered the system at a different moment. The electronic voting machine replaced the paper ballot: tried in Kerala in May 1982, given statutory authority by an amendment to the Representation of the People Act, 1951 that came into force in March 1989, and extended to every parliamentary constituency in 2004. The elector's photo identity card (EPIC), introduced in 1993 under Chief Election Commissioner T. N. Seshan, attacks a different problem — impersonation at the polling booth. NOTA, created by a Supreme Court judgment of 27 September 2013, gives the voter a way to reject every candidate on the ballot while still recording a vote. The voter verifiable paper audit trail, first used in a Nagaland by-poll in September 2013 and universal only from the 2019 general election, prints a slip the voter can see through a window, so that an electronic count can be checked against a physical record.

State PCS 2025 Q116 — Polity & Governance PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2025 Q116 — Polity & Governance PYQ with Answer