MUMBAI: The Election Commission of India (ECI) on Tuesday released a statement denying claims of discrepancies in electronic voting machines (EVM) and mismatched tallies between EVM and Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) slips. This follows opposition allegations questioning the integrity of the election process.The ECI explained that it is mandatory to count the VVPAT slips from five randomly selected polling stations per state assembly constituency and assembly segment.“Accordingly, VVPAT slip count of randomly selected five polling stations per assembly constituency was conducted on November 23, 2024, during the counting procedure, in front of counting observers and representatives of candidates. As per that, slip count of 1440 VVPAT units from 288 assembly constituencies of Maharashtra state has been tallied with respective Control Unit data. There is no discrepancy found between VVPAT slip count and EVM Control unit count as per the reports received from the concerned district election officers (DEOs). Due procedure laid by ECI has been followed,” the ECI statement said.Maharashtra Congress President Nana Patole criticized the EVM system, claiming that voters, in a democracy, should be considered the “king,” but their votes are being “stolen” through EVMs. He argued that the state assembly election was not conducted in a fair and transparent manner.“People have got doubts and suspicions over EVMs, and Markadwadi is working as a torchbearer in this dark period. This village has shown the way to the nation by demanding voting through ballot papers to ensure transparency. To safeguard the right to vote in a democracy and ensure elections are conducted via ballot papers, a large-scale movement similar to the Bharat Jodo Yatra will soon be launched. And this movement will be started from Markadwadi village itself,” Patole said.The state Congress chief also expressed concerns about the surprising results of the assembly elections. “According to official figures released by the ECI on polling day at 5 PM, a 58.33% voter turnout was recorded. However, this figure rose to 65.2% by 11:30 PM on that same night, and further, it went to 66.05% by 3 PM the next day. How were an additional 7.6 million votes recorded? We want video evidence of long queues after 5 PM in any constituency,” he added.
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