Hyderabad: The Election Commission Friday expressed satisfaction on the level of preparedness for the 7 December assembly elections in Telangana.
There would be 32,796 polling stations and average number of electors per polling station will be 856, Chief Election Commissioner O P Rawat told reporters here.
The Commission earlier visited the state about a month ago. “Things have improved considerably and Commission expresses satisfaction on the level of preparedness (for the polls) in Telangana as on date,” he said.
The Chief Electoral Officer, district election officers and SPs have done hard work and applied themselves to all those areas which were identified for further improvement on election preparedness, he said.
All polling stations would have Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) and Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) machines.
“This time 100 per cent polling stations will be covered by VVPAT machines,” he said.
The election machinery has already seized unaccounted money of Rs 77.80 crore whereas in 2014, the total seizure was Rs 76 crore during the whole election period. Rawat said the Commission has taken steps to identify duplicate names.
He was speaking after the commission reviewed poll preparedness in the state on Thursday and Friday with political parties and officials. Asked about some former Chief Election Commissioners reportedly expressing views that EVMs were not 100 per cent tamper-proof, he said nothing could be done to the machines “with the security regimen which the Commission has prescribed.”
“Anybody saying that with certain conditions that any machine in this world is not tamper-proof. Because, machine does not have eyes, ears, mouth, hands. It can’t protect itself. It has to be in the custody of some human being and that human being does not have any character. What happens to the machine you can easily guess,” he said.
“That is something very different. But otherwise these machines are totally tamper-proof. In the security regimen which the Election Commission prescribed nothing can be done to these machines,” he said.
Asked about the objection raised by some parties about pink ballot being used on the EVM as pink is used by a party in Telangana, he said the “complaint came rather late in the day.” The use of pink ballot for all assembly elections started in 1952, he said, adding that it cannot be changed because some party has adopted that colour.
“The objection should have been raised at the time of that party adopting that colour. Not us, who are using this colour since 1952,” he said.