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 EVMs 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.

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Police released photographs of three Kashmiri militants believed to be involved in the killing of army officer Ummer Fayaz but an umbrella organisation, that include the Hizbul Mujahideen, on Friday denied any role in the incident.

Posters with the photographs of the three Hizbul militants men were pasted across south Kashmir, the hotbed of insurgency where the young, unarmed lieutenant’s body was found early on Wednesday, a few hours after he was abducted from the wedding ceremony of a cousin in Shopian. He was shot twice.

Police announced a reward for information leading to the arrest of Ishfaq Ahmad Thokar, Gayasul-Islam and Abbas Ahmad Bhat. The three are suspected to be part of the group that snatched the Rajputana Rifles officer, who hailed from Kulgam in south Kashmir and was home on leave, sources said.

Eyewitnesses said a group of armed men entered the house and took away Fayaz, who was sitting with the bride, as more militants waited outside.

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You should be convinced that EC has no favourites... Sad that EC has backed out of hackathon