HYDERABAD: Is TS polls going to be 100 per cent digital with no possibility of human error or tampering? Some candidates beg to differ. Picture this, on December 7, every time a voter enters the ballot unit and casts a vote on the EVM, the data on who got the vote is stored on a smaller controlling unit, which at the end of the day is sealed with all the cumulative data.
On December 11, the seal of this would be broken in the presence of counting agents from various parties. On the small screen of the controlling unit (2*6 inch), the number assigned to each candidate appears as per serial order, alongside the results that were recorded. However, once these are displayed on the screen, they are manually recorded on a paper and counted further.
“We saw this during the mock polls on December 2 and fail to understand if it is meant to be so by design. In our constituency especially, party-appointed counting agents are made to stand behind a screen from where they would not be able to verify whether the counting officer noted the correct number from the controlling unit to the paper,” noted Lubna Sarwath, Karwan candidate from Socialist party (India).
She and other contestants have shot a letter to the ECI raising their concerns about the authenticity of the process. Their ultimate demand is to have the results shown in each of the 296 controlling units be simultaneously displayed on a bigger monitor.