A day after the issue of “faulty” EVM in counting of votes for Delhi University Students Union (DUSU) elections, that put question mark over the fairness of the election process through EVMs , the Election Commission of India (ECI) clarified that it is not responsible for the conduct of elections held by various organisations or institutions.
ECI clarified that it uses only single post EVMs (i.e. vote can be cast only for one post) while in the elections at DUSU are held through multi-post EVMs (i.e. vote can be cast for more than one post, for instance president, vice-president, general secretary). It said that such EVM’s are technically completely different from ECI’s single post EVMs.
“Certain complaints of alleged tampering of EVMs during the recently held elections held by different organizations/institutions elsewhere also generated wrong perception about EVMs. It was noted that confusion exists in the minds of many about the jurisdiction of ECI. We would like to clarify once gain on this occasion that ECI is not responsible for the conduct of local body elections(Municipalities, Panchayats etc.) that are conducted by the State Election Commissions and elections held by various organisations/institutions in the country and consequently about various protocols and procedures adopted by them,” stated ECI.
“The Commission is confident and has firm conviction about the integrity, non-tamperability and credibility of ECI-EVMs. The basis of confidence of the Commission flows from a wide range of technical and administrative protocols and procedural safeguards that protects our EVMs and VVPATs against any sort of tampering during manufacture, transportation, storage, polling and counting process,” it said.
The Commission stated that the important technical and administrative safeguards available in ECI-EVMs might not be available in EVMs being used by other organisations/institutions.