New Delhi, Feb 1 : Amid growing demands for reintroducing the paper ballot, the opposition parties are meeting on Friday to discuss the course of action to take on the issue of tampering Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs).
The meeting will be held at 1530 in the national capital’s Constitution Club.
It is learnt that the main opposition party, the Congress, has asked other parties to convey the meeting to discuss on EVMs, as most of the leaders are in Delhi to attend Parliament’s Budget session, in which the Narendra Modi government will introduce the Budget on Friday.
Though the grand old party has not categorically rejected the EVMs as it pointed out that there is not enough time before the Election Commission to replace the EVMs with ballot paper for the coming Lok Sabha elections, which is expected to take place in May this year.
The Congress demanded the poll body to count the 50 percent VVPAT slips in every booths to ensure transparency.
However, the Chief Election Commissioner Sunil Arora had rejected the claim and had said, “in ballot paper era there used to be innumerable complaints about impersonation and booth capturing by anti-social elements and musclemen etc besides the inordinate delays in declaring results which sometimes spread from three to four days”.
Mr Arora had added that, “ECI is always open to all kinds of feedback in all forms from all stakeholders particularly the political parties who are the most significant stakeholders after the voters. ECI is not going to be intimidated, coerced or pressurized into going back to ballot papers days”.
