The Election Commission of India (ECI) on Tuesday clarified that there was no mismatch between the Voter-Verified Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) slips and the votes cast in Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) during the recently concluded Maharashtra assembly elections.
In its statement, the commission said it followed mandatory guidelines requiring the counting of VVPAT slips from five randomly selected polling stations in each assembly segment. The count was conducted on November 23, the day the election results were declared, in the presence of a counting observer and representatives of candidates.
A total of 1,440 VVPAT slips from 288 constituencies were tallied against the respective control unit data from EVMs. "There is no discrepancy found between VVPAT slip count and EVM control unit count as per the reports received from the concerned District Election Officers (DEOs)," the ECI said, adding that the procedure had been followed in accordance with the commission's guidelines.
The ECI’s statement comes amid ongoing controversy over the fairness of the election. Days earlier, opposition parties in Maharashtra, led by the Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) alliance, boycotted the oath-taking ceremony of the newly elected legislators during a special session of the state assembly.
Prominent opposition leaders, including Shiv Sena (UBT) leader Aaditya Thackeray, have raised concerns about the integrity of the EVMs used in the polls. Thackeray accused the ECI of allowing the "misuse of EVMs" during the election, while several candidates from opposition parties claimed discrepancies between the votes they received and the final results, particularly in constituencies where they had expected strong performances