EC refrains to commit on tallying 50% votes with VVPAT

The Election Commission on Monday refrained from making any commitment on the Opposition demand that the vote data retrieved from at least half of the Electronic Voting Machines in each constituency is tallied with the slips generated by the Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) devices.

The representatives of Congress, Telugu Desam Party, Nationalist Congress Party and All India Trinamool Congress met Chief Election Commissioner Sunil Arora and Election Commissioner Ashok Lavasa. They reiterated their apprehensions about the credibility of Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs). In a memorandum submitted to the poll-panel, they argued that the electronic votes displayed by the EVMs as received by the respective candidates should be counter checked with the slips generated by the VVPATs, at least in case of 50% of the polling booths in a constituency.

“To bring transparency to the election process we should go back to paper ballot but due to time constraint, we are demanding that 50% of VVPATs should be counted at random and be tallied with EVMs,” Chandrababu Naidu, Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh and TDP chief, said after he and other opposition leaders met the EC.

The EC assured to examine their demand. The poll panel, however, made it clear that it would take into account the orders of the courts as well as the report, which it would soon receive from the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI).

The commission had asked the ISI to recommend the percentage of VVPATs, which should be selected for counting of paper slips to counter check with the vote data retrieved from the EVMs.

At present

The EC at present verifies VVPAT slips with the electronic vote count on the EVM in one randomly selected polling station in every assembly constituency in case of state assembly elections, and in one randomly selected polling station in every assembly segment of a parliamentary constituency in Lok Sabha polls.

The EC said that it would also take into account the “overall administrative and operational feasibility on the ground” before firming up any response to the demand.