Congress raises EVM security issue

New Delhi: A Congress delegation met the Election Commission (EC) Saturday and raised concerns over the security of Electronic Voting Machines or EVMs inside strong rooms and their handling during the counting process in Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh.

A controversy has broken out in Madhya Pradesh over the delay in EVMs reaching the collection centre in Sagar on Friday, a full 48 hours after voting ended in the state elections on Wednesday.

The EC in Madhya Pradesh, however, said these EVMs were not used for voting, and were among the ones kept on standby to be used in case of a technical snag.

After the meeting Cong-ress MP Vivek Tankha claimed there was no electricity in a strong room in Bhopal for over an hour during which the CCTV cameras had also stopped functioning. He also clai-med that 48 hours after the closing of polls in the sta-te, a school bus bearing no number plate and carrying EVMs had reached the Sagar district collector’s office. He said, “The objective of this was ostensibly to deposit these machines with the office of the collector. These spare EVMs were to be deposited two hours after the polls and not after two days. This happened in the Khuria seat from where the state home minister is contesting the polls.”

Senior Congress leader Abhishek Singhvi alleged that in UP’s Sarhanpur district there were discrepancies such as erroneous deletion of names of voters on booth number 44. Congress leader and AICC’s Chattisgarh in-charge P.L. Punia said suspicious activities were being reported in the Dhamtari Assembly seat in the state. He claimed suspicious people with laptops and mobile phones were seen around the strong rooms, where EVMs were kept after the voting, on the pretext of repairing the CCTVs.