Election Commission rejects opposition’s plea on VVPATs Verification!

New Delhi, (22/5/2019): The Election Commission today rejected the plea of 22 opposition parties seeking a change in the way the votes will be counted. The opposition yesterday handed a memorandum to the Election Commission

Chief Election Commissioner Sunil Arora along with election commissioners Ashok Lavasa and Sushil Chandra had taken up this matter through disscusion and decided not to have a change in the process of vote counting.

In their memorandum to the panel, the parties had said that in order to make the process more transparent, paper slips must be counted first and if there is a discrepancy with what is shown digitally on the machines, then all votes – instead of the 5% the EC has decided to at present – in the assembly segment of that parliamentary constituency should be cross-checked.

At present, the counting will involve the matching of paper slips in five polling booths picked at random for each assembly segment towards the end of counting.

Election commission officials cite existing orders to point out that in case there is any mismatch between electronic candidate-wise result of the Control Unit and the candidate-wise VVPAT slips manual count, recounting of the VVPAT slips of that particular VVPAT shall be conducted till the recount is tallied with the EVM count or one of the previous VVPAT slips count

In cases where mock-poll data was not erased from EVMs by election officials, those units will be kept aside and only VVPAT slips will be referred to during the counting.