Technological Discovery and Performative Transparency: The Ethics of Secrecy and Data Design of Postcolonial India’s Electronic Voting Machines

This article builds on the literature focusing on institutional transparency by historically and ethnographically investigating normative discourses associated with the development of electronic voting machines (EVMs) in postcolonial India. Specifically, we trace the role of transparency in the context of scientific knowledge production, which unfolds in a postcolonial context. Interpreting our archive, we argue that the Electoral Commission of India (ECI) has engaged in forms of performative transparency with Indian publics in order to shape the field in which electoral technologies in India evolve and how they are ethically assessed. Rather than only solicit wider public participation in the creation of EVMs, by disclosing relevant data or design elements to the Indian public, we observe that the ECI, which is charged with the enterprise of advancing electoral practices and its associated technological media, also engages in acts of transparency and secrecy during various periods of public debate regarding innovation and socio-technical and political-institutional development. We analyse the manners in which the ECI has designed and implemented the use of EVMs, often under a shroud of secrecy, on the one hand, while also striving to publicly announce India’s arrival as a world leader through the use of platform technologies in the context of election management, on the other. Based on archival and ethnographic evidence that we collected, we argue that the ECI has sought to generate stable arrangements for itself in the context of contention around EVMs, arrangements which are generative of socio-technical ensembles which strive to ethically legitimate and improve EVMs and Indian election management. We describe how the ECI uses transparency to secure public confidence in EVMs while also being secretive about the internal design of EVMs as a way to claim that the devices are physically tamperproof. Entangled together as they are, we illustrate how the Commission’s strategic employment of transparency and secrecy, and the countermoves of the anti-EVM movement, the latter of which stems from a perpetual suspicion about the functioning of EVMs, creates a dynamic which is generative of technoscientific discovery. This investigation contributes insights from the arena of electoral contests in postcolonial South Asia to the study of technoscience history and ethics as well as advances the study of Indian elections through an examination of the design, deployment and public representations of EVMs.