The opposition parties decided to come on united platform again and call upon the Election Commission after most exit polls on May 19 predicted an easy victory for the BJP and its NDA allies and dismal performance by the regional parties and the Congress.
The controversy surrounding electronic voting machines (EVMs) is refusing to die down. A day before the counting day, leaders of 22 Opposition parties approached the Election Commission yet again with the plea to first take up the counting of paper slips of five voter-verifiable paper audit trail (VVPAT) machines and match them with the corresponding electronic voting machines (EVMs).
They also asked the Commission to extend matching exercise to all the VVPATs and EVMs in the assembly segment if even a single discrepancy or mismatch of votes is found in the initial five machines.
"We are only asking the EC to respect the people's mandate, it cannot be manipulated. The EC is saying one blood sample is enough but if that sample is showing total pollution in the body then you have to scan the whole body," said Andhra Pradesh chief minister Chandrababu Naidu, the prime crusader, after meeting the Commission.
The opposition parties decided to come on united platform again and call upon the Election Commission after most exit polls on May 19 predicted an easy victory for the BJP and its NDA allies and dismal performance by the regional parties and the Congress.
Asserting that democracy is at stake and a lot of it depends on the EVMs, senior Congress leader Ghulam Nabi Azad said, is it too much for an asking as we, the 22 opposition parties , together represent about 75 percent vote share.
He said the Election Commission has told them that it will take up our request and convey its decision to us after discussing it with the statisticians.
Congress leader, Abhishek Manu Singhvi, who also argued for 50 percent matching of VVPATs in the Supreme Court, said, "If parties having support of 75 percent electorates are saying then why cannot you change the guidelines to count the 5 VVPATs first. If the sample comes out vitiated then why should you not match 100 percent VVPATs? It is not a no-brainer, why cannot the EC implement it."
The delegation also red flagged the suspicious movement of EVMs and VVPATs in several states - Haryana, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and Punjab. Citing videos that have surfaced on social media, they asserted that it reinforces their concerns about tampering.
"Parties also spoke about how they were issues with EVMs even during polling. It was also discussed that at some polling booths, the votes were not getting registered and when a button was pressed, the vote would go only to the BJP," Azad said.
Decrying Opposition parties' move as a condemnable act, union minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said, they should humbly accept their defeat with grace.
"How come EVMs were good when Mamata Banerjee became West Bengal Chief Minister twice and Amarinder Singh became Punjab chief minister…But when there is expectation that we will win because people of this country want Narendra Modi to be prime minister again, then EVM becomes unreliable," asked Prasad.
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