Days before the counting of votes in the Assembly elections, the former Finance Minister, P. Chidambaram, suggested on Sunday that the Election Commission match the electronic voting machine count with the voter verifiable paper trail (VVPAT) count “to salvage” its “credibility.”
In a series of tweets, he reasoned that this would “eliminate” suspicions of EVM tampering. “After its confession that it has failed to control the use of black money in elections and [about] mass deletion of voter names in Telangana, what can the EC do to salvage its reputation? It can match the EVM count with the VVPAT count. It now does it for ONE booth [polling unit]. Why can’t it be done for ALL the booths?” he said.
“The EC has given NO valid reason so far for refusing to match the EVM and VVPAT counts. Matching the counts for one booth is tokenism. The counts must be matched for all booths to eliminate the suspicion of EVM tampering,” he said.
Mr. Chidambaram said that matching all EVMs with VVPATs would result in a delay of no more than two-three hours in declaring the result. “If delay in declaration of results is the reason, the delay will be no more than 2-3 hours. Nothing will be lost if the results are declared at 5 p.m. on the counting day,” he said.
The ‘confession’ he mentioned in his tweet referred to the former Chief Election Commissioner, O.P. Rawat, declaring a day after his retirement on December 1 that demonetisation had failed to curb the use of black money in elections.
