Kolkata: Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) Sunil Arora ruled out Friday going back to the ballot paper, a demand raised by many opposition parties who have questioned authenticity of the electronic voting machine (EVM). In fact a number of opposition parties including the Congress conducted a meeting on this issue Friday in New Delhi.
“We are not going back to the days of ballot paper. (The) EVMs have been in use in our country for more than two decades. And it has been a consistent policy of the ECI (Election Commission of India) for quite some time and I think it will remain the same,” Arora told reporters here.
“Political parties have a right to make their feedback known and their apprehensions because they’re the biggest stakeholders after the voters. But, we’re not going to go back to the ballot paper days, times when muscle power was used to snatch ballot paper and inordinate delays in counting,” the CEC added.
Arora was interacting with the media after two days of deliberations with political parties and officials here over the upcoming general elections. West Bengal election commissioner Ashok Lavasa and deputy election commissioners, Umesh Sinha, Sandip Saxena, Sudip Jain and Chandrabushan Kumar were also present.
The CEC’s support of EVM comes on heels of a raging debate over the efficacy of the machine. At the Brigade rally of opposition parties here last month, National Conference chief Farooq Abdullah had called the EVM ‘chor (thief) machine’.
Arora cited that there was a difference between tampering and malfunctioning. “We’ve been using the words very loosely as if they are synonymous. Tampering and malfunctioning are two different things. The commission has zero tolerance on malfunctioning. We’re constantly trying to upgrade the EVMs and make them foolproof,” asserted Arora.
On a US-based self-proclaimed hacker’s recent claim that the 2014 poll was rigged by tampering EVMs, Arora described it as ‘false’ and a ‘ploy with criminal intent’.
PTI