Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh that will go to polls simultaneously in November–December this year will have about 47,000 and 7,500 polling stations, respectively.
The Election Commission (EC) is confident of full coverage of the upcoming elections in Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh with Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) machines.
"We already have 85,000 VVPATs and 30,000 more will be added by September-end, which will be enough to cover each polling station in both the states. This includes the reasonable replacement value that needs to be factored in for possible malfunctioning of machines," said sources in the EC.
Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh that will go to polls simultaneously in November–December this year will have about 47,000 and 7,500 polling stations, respectively.
The EC is also expected to submit an affidavit in the Supreme Court regarding the same. While the apex court had in October 2013 directed the EC to introduce VVPATs, in a recent hearing earlier this month, there was confusion on whether the poll regulator will have adequate VVPAT machines for the Assembly elections.
The SC had also asked the Commission to file an affidavit on the plea demanding the use of EVMs with the VVPATs in the forthcoming Gujarat elections.
EC sources said that before announcing the election schedule for Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh, they will declare how much percentage of VVPATs slips will be matched with the votes cast on the EVMs and at how many polling stations.
"We have almost decided the whole process after series of meetings and will announce it in a week or so. The whole process of counting and matching VVPATs with EVMs will then become part of the election instructions manual that will be sent to all the respective CEOs and from there to all the polling centres," said the official.
"We have estimated that counting and matching of voters' slips with EVMs will take about one-and-a-half hours to two hours," the official added.
The Commission is hopeful that the complete coverage of polling stations with VVPATs will put an end to the "smear campaign" against it and put the faith back in the EVMs.
During the recently held Assembly elections in five states, the role of Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) had come under severe criticism with several political parties, especially Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) and Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), casting doubts on their efficacy and even accusing that the machines were tampered with to deliver favourable results for a particular party.
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