A set of Proboka of electoral officers segregating ballots.
The decision of the Karnatak Government to introduce ballots in the upcoming local elections in the local authority caused criticism of current and former government officers who served in the office of the main election officer and the State Election Commission.
When he talked to Hindu, several higher officers questioned the logic of using ballots. One of them said: “Local elections are often the hottest and open the door for handling on the political front, and paper ballots make it easier.”
Returning costs
In addition to the long -term process of counting votes, they said that the use of ballots would increase financial and environmental costs several times.
Some IAS officers in retirement who served as CEO and Commissioner for Election Commissioner claimed that the return on ballots is like “taking democracy back for 30 years”.
Operational “It’s a nightmare because there are CRORES ballots for printing, storage, guard and number. The mistakes are inevitable,” one of them said.
The current officer said: “If the real problem of trust is, the solution is not to leave EVM, but to strengthen the mechanisms of building confidence with greater use of audit trails to verify the voter (VVAT), public demonstrations that include political parties in random room, and use the data to count and secure data.”
Re -introduction of old problems
He also said that the ballots would not solve distrust, but “simply replaces one set of suspicion and re -introduce old problems that we worked very hard to remove.”
The former Chief Election Commissioner Navin Chawla in his book Counts every voice: The story of the Indian elections advocates the use of EVM and says: “When some political parties or candidates have lost elections, but quickly accuse EVM.
Furthermore, Mr. Chawla says “the new generation of EVM is more reliable.” It recommends damaged parties to “look in inside rather than blame the machine.
Mr. Chawla says: “EVMS would save the estimated two lake trees from cutting to produce more than 10,000 tons of paper needed for general choices. In the added elections to the assembly, millions of trees would be saved over time.”
Using EVM difficult in public opinion surveys
The Commissioner for Election Commissioner in retirement said that it would be difficult to use EVMS in Gram Panchayat (GP) surveys, because GPS are multiple departments/constituencies. For example, some GP departments in the district of Kalaburagi were not represented by one member, but five to six. The state used ballots in public opinion polls. However, the EVMS will be used in making elections for ZP/TP and City Corporations, which are carried out on party lines, the retirement official said.
Published – September 2025 17:30 is
