Kolkata: The first training programme, among a series of three for the polling personnel associated with the conduct of by elections at Kaliganj in Nadia scheduled on June 19, was held at Krishnanagar with the objective of making polling personnel aware of the various processes and their duties. About 1,829 personnel attended the two day training session that concluded on Sunday. The Election Commission of India (ECI) has deployed 2 officers — BC Patra, secretary, ECI, and Rahul Phukhan, EVM nodal officer, Assam, apart from Sumanta Roy, deputy CEO, West Bengal for presiding over the training.
Hands-on-training related to use of EVMs was conducted as per ECI guidelines and a mock drill on EVM voting was conducted by every presiding officer individually to have hands-on experience of the entire EVM process from polling till counting. In the mock drill, individual presiding officers themselves cast at least 100 votes randomly in EVM units. After completion of mock voting, the presiding officer tallied manual record of votes cast with electronic result of control unit and thereafter, electronic result from control unit with respective VVPAT slips count to satisfy themselves with the functioning of the EVMs. In the trainings organized earlier, the presiding officers were not required to individually go through the end-to-end process of polling and counting through EVMs, but were given some hands-on training on the polling process.