Our EVM can’t be tampered with: Indian EC
The Election Commission of India told the Supreme Court on Tuesday that its Electronic Voting Machines (EVM) could not be tampered with and that it is taking all measures to ensure that these machines are safely transported.
In an affidavit filed before the apex court in response to a notice following a petition filed by opposition party Congress' senior leader Kamal Nath, the federal poll panel told the top court that elections cannot be conducted according to anyone's "whims".
In a separate development, India's Chief Election Commissioner O P Rawat said on Tuesday night that political parties have raised suspicion on EVMs because of "tough competition," our New Delhi correspondent reports
"When competition gets tough, fingers are raised at the EC by political parties. But we have accepted all the challenges on complaints about EVMs and come out clean," Rawat said adding: "We are committed to ensuring a fair and transparent election process."
In its affidavit, the Commission said that Voter Verified Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) experiments since September 2017 in 843 assembly constituencies across various states had established that there were no glitches in their functioning.
It said a mock-check of five per cent of EVMs and VVPATs had been done before the machines were used.
Most political parties except a few in Assam and Tamil Nadu states had in 2010 expressed their satisfaction with the function of the EVMs, the EC said rejecting the charge of malfunctioning or tampering with the machines.
The EC counter-affidavit said mandatory verification of paper trail count was conducted during the counting process for assembly elections in Gujarat, Karnataka, Meghalaya, Himachal Pradesh, Nagaland, Tripura and other by-elections "and in all cases, the slip count has tallied with the electronic count".
The EC denied there was a shortage of VVPATs for the coming national elections due in 2019 and said the delivery of all the EVM and the VVPATs would be completed by November this year.
The EC said its decision to release only the 'image PDF' of the electoral roll in public this was a "conscious policy decision to protect the privacy of the elector as well as to prohibit profiling of electors in view of certain complaints made before the panel as well the global challenges to electoral integrity".
"The objective behind this guideline is to utilise the most advanced technological tools for dissemination of the electoral rolls in order to prevent manipulation of the electors' data and even if it may not be achievable cent per cent, this guideline has been made with the hope that the use of most advanced technology will at least create the greatest hurdle in electors profiling," the Commission said.
Kamal Nath moved the Supreme Court alleging discrepancies in the electoral list for Madhya Pradesh, where fresh assembly polls are scheduled later this year, and demanding that the list be released in the word format. He also demanded that the viewing time of the VVPATs (to enable a voter to ascertain if his vote has gone to the candidate he intended) be increased from seven to 15 seconds.
On this, the EC affidavit added it had followed the rules and that "so long as the Election Commission of India is providing the electoral rolls in accordance with the concerned rules, it is no one's legal right to demand the electoral roll in a particular format which is against a conscious policy decision taken by the ECI".
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