Win gives AAP's call for EVMs with VVPAT a boost

NEW DELHI: One of the long standing demands of AAP national convenor Arvind Kejriwal finally came to fruition, after the Election Commission (EC), for the first time, used electronic voting machines (EVM) with voter verifiable paper audit trail (VVPAT) in all polling stations in the Bawana by-poll in Delhi.

Of the 2.94 lakh voters, 1,31,950 had exercised their franchise on August 23.

Battered by a series of electoral defeats, Kejriwal had repeatedly urged the Commission to investigate cases of faulty EVMs to ascertain whether they were tampered with to favour the BJP in the past elections.

AAP spokesperson and Greater Kailash MLA Saurabh Bhardwaj welcomed the move, which was promised by the EC in the Supreme Court.

Bhardwaj tweeted that in the Bawana civic body polls, where old EVM without VVPAT was used, AAP lost 5 out of 6 wards.

He demanded that the next step should be mandatory counting of VVPAT paper slips of 25 per cent booths.

Delhi government spokesperson Nagendar Sharma tweeted: "VVPAT has to be mandatory in every election & VVPAT slips also must be counted. This is first step in the big struggle."

Back in May, AAP had also demanded that paper trail of votes be re-implemented for all elections in the country.

At that time, Kejriwal and Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia had met with Chief Election Commissioner Nasim Zaidi, calling for a tampered free election.

It may be noted here that the Delhi State Election Commission (SEC) had used first generation EVMs in the municipal corporation elections in Delhi. AAP had sought an explanation from the SEC about the use of such voting machines, which were more susceptible to tampering.

The party had also requested the SEC to provide details of components of the first generation EVMs, such as microcontrollers and chips used for storage of memory in voting machines.