The Patchwork Problem: Adopting the Indian EVM Model to Standardize American Election Infrastructure

Writer: Spurthi Reddy

Article Editor: Geetika Kosuri

Associate Editors: Dina Fakhar & Leona Rindle

The United States currently operates under a hyper-decentralized electoral model, where the manner of voting is determined by a patchwork of over 8,000 local jurisdictions, leading to an environment that relies on private vendors, lacks uniform technical standards, and causes human error in ballot interpretation and prolonged tabulation delays.¹ This article argues that to replace its current network of fragmented voting technologies, the United States should utilize its authority under the Elections Clause to adopt a nationally standardized Electronic Voting Machine (EVM) system modeled after the Election Commission of India’s (ECI) standards. Thus, by emulating the Indian model, the U.S. will be able to adopt a system that is uniform, reliable, and state-vetted, using a system that has already successfully eliminated invalid ballots and delivered rapid, day-of results for a billion-person democracy.

I. Issues with the U.S. Voting System 

The American electoral system’s administrative disarray stems from its hyper-decentralized structure, where the manner of voting is outsourced by each county to private vendors.² The federal Election Assistance Commission (EAC) possesses only advisory power, which means the U.S. lacks the authority to implement uniform technical standards necessary to ensure that a vote cast in one jurisdiction is tallied using the same procedure as a vote cast in another.³ This causes a reliance on proprietary black box software: a system with internal workings, code, and logic that are unknown or hidden.⁴ Without a standardized interface, there are so many variations in ballot design used in a singular election cycle: from hand marked paper ballots to machine-prepared ballots counted by optical scan devices.⁵  Poor ballot design across different systems hampers a citizen’s ability to express their preferences easily and accurately.⁶ If, for example, County A employs optical scan technology and County B utilizes a touchscreen Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) device, the same ambiguous input may register as a valid vote in one jurisdiction and be rejected in another. This would reduce the equal ballot treatment to a matter of geography. These cross-jurisdictional discrepancies not only risk the arbitrary rejection of valid votes but erode public confidence in the integrity of the tabulation process itself.⁷ 

Furthermore, when software source code is proprietary and hidden from public review, independent auditors, including election officials themselves, cannot verify whether the machine tallied votes correctly. A system that cannot be independently verified is one where errors go undetected and uncorrected.⁸ 

The constitutional dangers of administrative fragmentation were most vividly realized in the wake of the 2000 presidential election. The election process in the state of Florida exposed how disparate mechanical interfaces, such as punch-card systems, created chads: physical ambiguities that lacked a uniform standard for recording voter intent. This technological fragmentation forced a subjective, manual recount that varied by county, there was no standardization in how chads were counted. In the Supreme Court case Bush v. Gore, the court held that the Equal Protection Clause was violated when the state failed to provide specific standards for determining voter intent, resulting in the arbitrary and disparate treatment of  ballots across different counties and members of the electorate.⁹ While the Court’s holding was specifically directed at the manual recount of physical chads, the underlying legal principle reveals a fundamental flaw in the American electoral patchwork.¹⁰ If the Equal Protection Clause is interpreted to mean that the Constitution forbids using different human standards to count a vote, it must also forbid using a fragmented network of machines that interpret voter intent differently from one county to the next.¹¹ Under this clause, a state effectively fails its citizens when the likelihood of a vote being accurately counted depends entirely on the mechanical standards of a specific local jurisdiction.¹² 

II. How India Achieves Standardization

The Election Commission of India is an autonomous constitutional authority responsible for administering Union and State election processes in India.¹³ Vested under Article 324 of the Indian constitution is the power to enforce a singular technological standard across all 28 states and eight union territories.¹⁴ The ECI’s Electronic Voting Machine (ECI-EVM) functions as the direct antithesis to the U.S. model of private outsourcing; these machines are manufactured exclusively by two state-owned enterprises, ensuring that the method of voting is state-vetted rather than proprietary.¹⁵ The ECI-EVM records a definitive digital signal at the push of a button, removing the need for human officials to interpret voter intent on hand-marked paper, thereby neutralizing the primary source of tabulation delays and invalid ballots.¹⁶ To ensure accessibility and prevent voter intent ambiguity, a paper slip is displayed behind a glass window for seven seconds, allowing the voter to verify their choice before it automatically falls into a sealed collection box.¹⁷ Critics, including some Indian opposition parties, have raised concerns about the auditability and transparency of the ECI-EVM system. However, the VVPAT mechanism was introduced precisely to address these concerns: voters can independently verify their selections before the slip is sealed, and in the event of a dispute, election officials may conduct a manual tally of the slips against the electronic totals, rendering the system auditable at every stage.¹⁸ Furthermore, this system is entirely standalone, it contains no internet, Wi-Fi, or Bluetooth capabilities, thereby cybersecurity risk.¹⁹ This transparent process minimizes the possibility for human error while standardizing the vote counting process, enhancing the adoptability of the system. All in all, the system is uniform, accurate, state-vetted, and consistently provides rapid, day-of results for India’s billion-person democracy.

III. Implementing ECI-EVM in the U.S. 

The Elections Clause in the American Constitution states that while states can decide the “Times, Places and Manner” of holding elections, Congress may at any time “by Law make or alter such Regulations.”²⁰ The Supreme Court has long interpreted the term ‘Manner’ to encompass the entire mechanical process of the ballot from the registration of voters to the counting of results.²¹ Therefore, it grants Congress the critical federal provision to override the state’s authority by law and establish a uniform national standard.

A significant constitutional constraint, however, is the 10th Amendment which prohibits the federal government from forcing state officials to execute federal regulatory programs. To navigate this, Congress could pass a modernized Help America Vote Act.²² This law would not order states to manage their elections in a certain way but would instead establish a national technical certification that only the EVM model (modeled after the ECI) can satisfy for use in federal races. Furthermore, Congress could also utilize its Spending Power to incentivize uniformity through financial encouragement rather than compulsion.²³ Following the precedent of South Dakota v. Dole, the federal government could provide massive infrastructure grants to states.²⁴ These funds would be strictly conditioned on the state’s adoption of the standardized, state-vetted EVMs. Through this dual mechanism of a technical certification under a modernized HAVA and conditional infrastructure grants, Congress can achieve the uniform, state-vetted EVM standard that the current patchwork system has long failed to provide.

IV. Conclusion

Today, the administrative fragmentation of the American electoral system is a constitutional vulnerability. As long as voter intent remains subject to the mechanical inconsistencies of over 8,000 local jurisdictions and the black-box software of private vendors, the promise of the Equal Protection Clause remains unfulfilled. By leveraging the Elections Clause and the Spending Clause, the United States can transition to a nationally standardized EVM system modeled after the ECI to ensure uniformity, security, and accountability in the election process and prevent prolonged tabulation delays, therefore retaining electoral integrity.

1. See Wharton Pub. Pol’y Initiative, The Business of Voting: Market Structure and Innovation in the Election Technology Industry 18–22 (2017). ↩︎
2. Id. at 18. ↩︎
3. Help America Vote Act of 2002, 52 U.S.C. § 20901–21145 (2018). ↩︎
4. Wharton Pub. Pol’y Initiative, supra note 1, at 6. ↩︎
5. Wharton Pub. Pol’y Initiative, supra note 1, at 19. ↩︎
6. See Lawrence Norden, The Machinery of Democracy: Voting System Security, Accessibility, Usability, and Cost, Brennan Ctr. for Just. 12–15 (2006). See also Richard L. Hasen, The Stagnation, Retrogression, and Potential Pro-Voter Transformation of U.S. Election Law, 134 Yale L.J. 1, 15–20 (2025). ↩︎
7. Wharton, supra note 1, at 19. ↩︎
8. Norden, supra note 6, at 12–15. ↩︎
9. Bush v. Gore, 531 U.S. 98, 104–05 (2000) (per curiam). ↩︎
10. Id. ↩︎
11. Id. ↩︎
12. Id. ↩︎
13. Voters’ Services Portal, Election Commission of India, https://voters.eci.gov.in (on file with the Undergraduate Law Review at FSU). See also Aditya Sondhi, Elections, in The Oxford Handbook of The Indian Constitution 196, 198–202 (Sujit Choudhry, Madhav Khosla & Pratap Bhanu Mehta eds., 2016). ↩︎
14.  India Const. art. 324, cl. 1. ↩︎
15. FAQs on EVM, Election Commission of India, https://www.eci.gov.in/evm-faq-new (on file with the Undergraduate Law Review at FSU). See also Election Comm’n of India, Know Your EVM, (YouTube, Sep. 28, 2018), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJReQ8ao0SU&t=287s. ↩︎
16. Id. ↩︎
17. Id. ↩︎
18. Id. ↩︎
19. Id. ↩︎
20. U.S. Const. art. I, § 4, cl. 1. ↩︎
21. Smiley v. Holm, 285 U.S. 355, 366 (1932). See also Arizona v. Inter Tribal Council of Ariz., Inc., 570 U.S. 1, 8 (2013). ↩︎
22. See HAVA, 52 U.S.C. §§ 20901–21145. ↩︎
23. U.S. Const. art. I, § 8, cl. 1. ↩︎
24. South Dakota v. Dole, 483 U.S. 203 (1987). ↩︎