Yechury urges EC to re-work EVMs' sequence of components' placement

New Delhi: In a letter to Chief Election Commissioner Sunil Arora, Communist Party of India (Marxist) general secretary Sitaram Yechury on Monday urged the chief poll panel to re-work the sequence of placement of components of the electronic voting machines (EVMs) by saying that the existing practice of the ballot unit directly sending the vote to the VVPAT without routing it through control unit could lead to manipulation.

Yechury also demanded a 100 per cent matching of VVPAT output with the EVM recorded data for each booth as well as a detailed plan of action and a status report on implementation to eliminate the adverse impact of money power.

"The credibility of the election process is based on transparency and explanations provided by the ECI being verifiable. However, on both these counts, the response of the ECI, following the 2019 elections has been far less than adequate. We, on behalf of the CPI(M), had written to you on several occasions to elicit these which met with little or no response," he said.

On the VVPAT issue, the CPM Politburo said that at present, the exercise of the choice in the ballot unit directly goes to the VVPAT and it is not known whether that is what is being recorded in the control unit, which counts the votes of the EVM.

"The current sequence of the three units is otherwise. Therefore, there is a strong case for re-working the sequence of placement of these components," he said.