Electronic Voting is the standard means of conducting elections using Electronic Voting Machines, sometimes called "EVMs" in India. The use of EVMs and electronic voting was developed and tested by the state-owned Electronics Corporation of India and Bharat Electronics in the 1990s. They were introduced in Indian elections between 1998 and 2001, in a phased manner. Prior to the introduction of electronic voting, India used paper ballots and manual counting. The paper ballots method was widely criticised because of fraudulent voting and booth capturing, where party loyalists captured booths and stuffed them with pre-filled fake ballots. The printed paper ballots were also more expensive, requiring substantial post-voting resources to count hundreds of millions of individual ballots. Embedded EVM features such as "electronically limiting the rate of casting votes to five per minute", a security "lock-close" feature, an electronic database of "voting signatures and thumb impressions" to confirm the identity of the voter, conducting elections in phases over several weeks while deploying extensive security personnel at each booth, have helped reduce electoral fraud and abuse, eliminate booth capturing and create more competitive and fairer elections. Indian EVMs are stand-alone machines built with once write, read-only memory.