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V-Pat: voting for expressions


V pat

V pat is a hit, the media reported. There has been all round appreciation for the effort on the part of the Election Commission to address a concern on the part of the electorate to ensure their vote through the machine has been rightly recorded. The lone beep and flash of tiny bulb of the electronic voting seemed insufficient to those who have the inherent distrust of the system. Now the printed paper in the form of the vpat has allayed those fears. The paper which displays for seven seconds the truth of their vote is a kind of a pat on their back on the job well done and in their hearts, the voters, could be patting the system on its back too.

My interest here is focussed not on the electorate's worries or the machine's performance.  Rather it is the name they have chosen for the system.  Voter- verified paper audit trail. This is what vpat stand for. This is the paper which assures the voter that he or she can verify whether his or her vote has been  (rightly) cast. What I wonder about is, is it really possible to have it named in another ways. Can it be simply vote- verifier? Or, vote-checker? Print vote checker? Isn't it a bit cumbersome a term for all of us when it is made so formalised a word? I feel so anyway.

Is this a way of our language? For instance, we have a body to control the affairs of cricket in India. It is BCCI. Board of control for cricket in India. Time and again I have contrasted this with ECB. English Cricket Board. Simple and straight. It does away with the services of so many prepositions and in the process renders it quite earthy and human. The cumbersomeness of our board's formal name can be compared with that of England's to know how far are we struggling to use our colonial masters language!  Cricket Australia may be too casual and touché for some of us even though  it shows the ways in which our board's name could have gone!

This is it to claim that the acronym skills of misdials are downright despicable. Indian amateur athletic federation is fine. So is value added tax, VAT. All these have simplicity and accessibility for the ordinary people writer all over it. This is not too pen up a debate on art of upskilling ourselves on the subject of abbreviations. If such a training is to be imparted, then our age, more than any other one gone past, is fit for that. The way abbreviations are flying thick and fast, with language getting compressed and contorted in our need to emotionally and financially economise, in our need to save time and keyboard punches, no age has sought umbrage under the urge to make it this brief and quick. But V-pat seems to have done a disservice to the basic rationale of an abbreviation. Unlike the simple ECI or EVM!








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