All polls will be held with paper trail: EC

ALLPARTY MEET Poll panel assures parties EVMs cannot be hacked, CEC Zaidi says ‘open challenge’ is on the cards

All future elections will be held with voting machines that have a paper trail attached, the Election Commission said on Friday amid a storm of allegations that poll results were manipulated by faulty devices.

The Voter Verified Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) system records the candidate and symbol a person voted for but the voter cannot take the receipt home.

The announcement was made by chief election commissioner Nasim Zaidi after a meeting with representatives of seven national and 35 recognised state parties here.

Zaidi said the commission will consider the demand from political parties to allow counting of some percentage of VVPAT slips in addition to the usual counting process to instill confidence among voters and political parties. He, however, reiterated that EVMs cannot be manipulated and the system is fool-proof.

He also said the poll panel will soon announce the date for an “open challenge”, where party representatives will be given EVMs – used in recent polls -- to prove allegations they can be tampered with.

The poll panel’s announcement came days after the Aam Aadmi Party used a dummy EVM to purportedly show how the machine could be manipulated, though a majority of the political parties on Friday chose to support the use of electronic voting machines provided they are accompanied by paper trail machines.

BJP ally Shiva Sena, however was among the few that stuck to the demand to revert to paper ballots.

You should be convinced that EC has no favourites... NASIM ZAIDI, chief election commissioner Sad that EC has backed out of hackathon ARVIND KEJRIWAL, Delhi chief minister, in a tweet after the meet