The Election Commission on Monday said that no mismatch was found between the votes polled on the Electronic Voting Machines and the corresponding tally of Voter Verified Paper Audit Trail slips in random counting in the recent Assembly elections in Maharashtra.
This came amid the Opposition Maha Vikas Aghadi – comprising the Shiv Sena (Uddhav Balasaheb Thackeray), the Nationalist Congress Party faction led by Sharad Pawar and the Congress – claiming that there were discrepancies in the polling and counting processes of the elections in the state.
A Voter Verified Paper Audit Trail, or VVPAT, is a machine that prints a paper slip of the candidate’s name, serial number and the party’s symbol after people have cast their vote. To avoid election fraud, it displays the paper slip for seven seconds for people to check if their vote has been cast correctly.
On Monday, the chief electoral office in Maharashtra said that it was mandatory to count the VVPAT slips in five randomly selected polling stations in each Assembly constituency or segment as per the guidelines issued by the Election Commission. This exercise was conducted on November 23, it added.
“As per that, slip count of 1440 VVPAT units from 288 Assembly Constituencies of Maharashtra State has been tallied with respective Control Unit data,” it said in a statement. “There is no discrepancy found between VVPAT slip count and EVM [Electronic Voting Machines] Control unit count as per the reports received from the concerned DEOs [district election officers].”
On November 23, the ruling Mahayuti alliance – comprising the Bharatiya Janata Party, the Shiv Sena group led by Eknath Shinde and the Nationalist Congress Party faction led by Ajit Pawar – won 230 seats in the 288-member Assembly. The Maha Vikas Aghadi won 46 seats.
Five days later, the Congress accused the poll panel of tampering with voter data in the elections and asked how voter turnout increased by 7.83 percentage points after the official polling time had ended.
On November 20, the day of polling in Maharashtra, a voter turnout of 58.22% was reported by 5 pm, according to Election Commission data. By 11.30 pm on the same day, the turnout went up to 65.02% and reached 66.05% by November 21.
On Tuesday, the Maha Vikas Aghadi reiterated its allegation about the voter turnout data and claimed that there was an increase of 76 lakh votes in the last hour of polling, The Indian Express reported.
“A press statement issued by the EC [Election Commission] on their social media handle and other mode of communication without the signature of the State Election Commissioner itself raises more serious questions than the answers,” the newspaper quoted Shiv Sena (Uddhav Balasaheb Thackeray) leader Priyanka Chaturvedi as saying.
Nationalist Congress Party (Sharadchandra Pawar) MLA Jitendra Awhad called the statement issued by the poll panel an “absolute lie” and claimed that it was trying to “mislead” the country, according to The Indian Express.
“There is no such arrangement [about counting or tallying the votes from VVPAT and EVMS] by the EC [Election Commission],” he said. “It is only when recounting is sought that they open the five machines. So all this is a whitewash.”
Congress leader Nana Patole said that the poll panel should answer how the count increased by 76 lakh votes in the last hour.
“The main question is how did 76 lakh votes increase and why the EC is not showing CCTV footage?” he asked, The Indian Express reported. “The EC should be transparent, which it has not been in the whole process. Issuing mere press statement will not help.”
In response to the allegations, state Additional Chief Electoral Officer Kiran Kulkarni on Tuesday said that the Electronic Voting Machine cannot be hacked or tampered with, ANI reported.
“There is a simple reason for this,” he said. “First, it is a standalone machine, it has no connection with any network or outer gadget. So, hacking or tampering is not possible. Second, the chip used in it is one-time programmable. So, there cannot be any reprogramming of it.”
He added that polling for the elections in the state was done in a “proper manner by following proper procedure”.
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