New Delhi: Certain complaints of alleged tampering of EVMs during the recently held elections held by different organizations/institutions elsewhere also generated wrong perception about EVMs of Election Commission of India. It was noted that confusion exists in the minds of many about the jurisdiction of ECI. We would like to clarify once again on this occasion that ECI is not responsible for the conduct of local body elections (Municipalities, Panchayats etc.) that are conducted by the State Election Commissions and elections held by various organisations/institutions in the country and consequently about various protocols and procedures adopted by them.
The Commission is confident and has firm conviction about the integrity, non-tamperability and credibility of ECI-EVMs. The basis of confidence of the Commission flows from a wide range of technical and administrative protocols and procedural safeguards that protects our EVMs and VVPATs against any sort of tampering during manufacture, transportation, storage, polling and counting process.
Till 2017, M/s Bharat Electronics Limited, Bangalore and M/s Electronics Corporation of India Limited, Hyderabad were allowed by the Commission to supply EVMs to State Election Commissions and other organisations (The permission letter issued in August, 2006 is enclosed). However, since May 2017, BEL and ECIL were directed to seek Commission’s prior approval and supply only EVMs that are different from ECI-EVMs to SECs or to other foreign countries, that too only after the current ordered quantities to ECI are fully supplied.
Old EVMs are sent to BEL/ECIL for destruction and destroyed as per strict protocol prescribed by the Commission.
Election Commission of India uses only single post EVMs (i.e. vote can be cast only for one post). In the elections at DUSU, it is told that multi-post EVMs (i.e. vote can be cast for more than one post for instance President/Vice-President/General Secretary), which are technically completely different from ECI’s single post EVMs, have been used.
The Commission would like to state that the important technical and administrative safeguards available in ECI-EVMs might not be available in EVMs being used by other organisations/institutions.
Click here to see Delhi univercity procurement permission 2006
