EC releases agenda for all-party meet on EVMs

The Election Commission has released the agenda for Friday’s all-party meeting on electronic voting machines.

The poll panel released the agenda a day after AAP MLA Saurabh Bhardwaj, to buttress the party’s claim, demonstrated in the Delhi Assembly that EVMs can be tampered with to make them deliver results in favour of a particular party.

The commission will seek the views of political parties on changing the rules of counting the paper slips generated by the Voter-Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) devices linked to EVMs.

The poll panel is planning to deploy EVMs with VVPATs across the country during the 2019 Lok Sabha elections.

The VVPAT systems generate paper slips for all the votes cast on the EVMs linked to them. At present, the poll panel is not counting the paper slips in all the cases.

According to the provisions under Rule 56 D of the Conduct of Elections Rules, 1961, if a candidate or his agent makes a request for counting the papers slips of any polling station, the returning officer decides the request as per the guidelines issued by the commission.

“Some suggestions have been made to revisit the rules regarding counting of paper slips from the VVPAT system. The political parties may give their views in this regard,” the commission noted.

During the meeting, the panel will also discuss other issues, including proposals to make bribery in elections a cognizable offence, to insert a new section 58B in the Representation of the People Act, 1951, to deal with cases of bribery of electors, for disqualification on framing of charges for the offence of bribery in elections, and enhancing transparency in funding of political parties.

V V Rao, convener of Election Watch, and Congress leader Tehseen Poonawala on Wednesday demanded that the poll panel should allow international experts to probe the credibility of EVMs.

“Why doesn’t the Election Commission open up this challenge for international hackers, media and election commissioners of foreign democracies to witness?” Poonawala said in a press conference.

 He also sought to know why the poll panel was posing a challenge to the theory of EVM hacking when it had already been exposed in 2010 that the machines could be tampered with, which led to the use of VVPATs.