Maharashtra Deputy Chief Minister Ajit Pawar on Thursday defended electronic voting machines (EVMs), saying that political parties blame machines for losing elections, but when they themselves win, all is well. Pawar insisted “I have full faith in EVM”.
According to the news agency ANI, the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) leader said, “The Congress came to power in Rajasthan and Punjab, where EVM was used only. When a party wins the election, everything is fine, But when they lose badly, they allege EVM has been messed up. ”
He said, “Maharashtra, for example, has 48 Lok Sabha seats, but if a party wins only 4-5 seats, its workers say that there was bumper voting in our village, so we got at least 8,000 out of 10,000 Votes should have been received. So they feel that there is something wrong with EVM. ” Pawar added, “There is no such thing, EVM works fine. What can I say? I trust EVM completely.”
Maharashtra’s Deputy Chief Minister’s statement is in keeping with the directive of Nana Patole, who is the newly appointed state Congress chief, in which he told the state government to allow voting on ballot papers for all future state and local body elections, apart from EVMs. Give. Patole gave these instructions as the Speaker of the Maharashtra Legislative Assembly last week, but has since resigned and will take over as the Maharashtra Congress President on Friday.
It is known that opposition parties have often alleged that EVMs can be tampered with and have demanded the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) -led central government to roll back the ballot paper system. However, the BJP has defended the machines, saying that they too have lost elections in many places, in which EVMs were used.
At the same time, the Election Commission has also defended the machines saying that they cannot be tampered with. The Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) and the Congress, which formed an alliance for the Bihar assembly elections last year, accused the EVM of tampering after losing to the BJP-led ruling coalition.
