Mumbai: A PIL has demanded that election
commission should not reveal voting figures of individual
Electronic Voting Machines, as it violates principle of
secret ballot.
Varsha Deshpande, a Satara-based lawyer, has filed the
petition. Her lawyer advocate Uday Warunjikar today argued
that prior to EVMs, ballot boxes from all voting booths would
be first collected, and ballot papers would be mixed, to make
it impossible to know whether a candidate has been favoured or
not by a particular locality.
But in the current system, vote break-up of each EVM
is disclosed, and a candidate can easily find out which
locality has not voted well for him, Warunjikar said.
This may lead to vengeful targeting of the locality
by ruling politicians, he said.
The petition is accompanied by reports published by
a Marathi daily in which voting patterns of each polling
stations within Satara constituency were given after recent
Lok Sabha elections.
Warunjikar demanded that figures from individual EVMs
should not be disclosed by the election commission.
Court has adjourned the hearing for two weeks, asking
petitioner to serve notice on Election Commission.
Bureau Report
First Published: Thursday, August 27, 2009, 22:24