Contending that free and fair elections have come under a “serious cloud” with EVMs a “major cause of concern”, 21 Opposition parties, including Congress president Rahul Gandhi, on Monday asked the Election Commission (EC) to audit at least 50 per cent of Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) with corresponding Voter Verifiable Paper
Audit Trail (VVPATs) in all constituencies during the Lok Sabha polls.
A memorandum to the EC signed by representatives from 21 Ppposition parties, cited “suspicious activities” concerning the EVMs during the November-December Assembly polls to five States. The leaders of various Opposition parties earlier met in Parliament and discussed their strategy on the issue.
The EC has assured the political parties that issues raised by them would be deliberated and examined. “While considering the averments made by the political parties, the commission shall also keep in view the pronouncements made by the different Courts as well as the report expected shortly from the Indian Statistical Institute on the subject besides the overall administrative and operational feasibility on the ground, before firming up any response,” the EC said in a statement.
The delegation included Ghulam Nabi Azad, Mallikarjun Kharge, Ahmed Patel and Anand Sharma of the Congress, Chandrababu Naidu (TDP), Sharad Yadav (L JD), Majid Menon (NCP), Derek O’Brien (Trinamool Congress), Ramgopal Yadav (SP), Satish Chandra Misra (BSP), Omar Abdullah (NC), Mohd Salim and TK Rangarajan (CPI-M), Kanimozhi (DMK), Manoj Jha (RJD), Sanjay Singh (AAP), D Raja (CPI), Danish Ali (JD-S), NK Premchandran (RSP), Badruddin Ajmal (AIUDF), Ashok Kumar Singh (JVM), Khurram Omer (IUML) and KG Kenye (NPF).
“Instances of EVMs and strong rooms becoming vulnerable to attacks and manipulations were widely recorded and reported. Added to this were incidents where there were power outages, failure of CCTV cameras at the strong rooms, detection of signals of wireless/mobile networks of a particular telecom operator in the vicinity of polling centres and strong rooms and so on and so forth,” they said in the memorandum.
The parties said there are “serious doubts about the credibility of EVMs and the purity of the entire electoral process” and sought the EC to mandate physical counter check of paper trail and matching it with the electronic vote in at least 50 per cent of all EVMs, if not all.
The auditing of over 50 per cent of EVMs with corresponding VVPATs is being practiced successfully in Venezuela by its National Electoral Council. It is a very easily implementable reform in India with hardly any additional costs.
The Opposition leaders submitted that after counting from EVMs, if it is found that the difference of votes cast in favor of the winning candidate and that cast in favour of second position securing candidate is less than 5 per cent of votes cast, then in that constituency, mandatory counting of paper trail from WPAT should be carried out in each polling station of that constituency.
“Attempts by the EC to lend reassurance to India have, unfortunately, failed miserably. The hackathon offered by EC remained a nonstarter since no one was allowed to even come near the machine. Admittedly, even EC does not know what is inside the machine,” the memorandum said.
The leaders of various parties had earlier met in Constitution Club on Friday and discussed their future strategy on the issue. The opposition parties had earlier sought moving back to the ballot paper system, but after the Election Commission made it clear that there was no possibility of going back to the old system, they changed their strategy and are now demanding matching of 50 per cent EVMs with VVPATs.