[caption id="attachment_149127" align="alignright" width="350"]
CEO, Abhijit Sinha, and the Additional CEO, N Moaning Aier, seen during the workshop with media on VVPAT in Kohima on November 10. (EM Images)[/caption]
Kohima, Nov. 10 (EMN): With the introduction of the Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) and the direction from the Election Commission of India (ECI) to use VVPAT with EVMs at all the polling stations in all the future elections to the Parliament and State Legislative Assemblies, the Chief Electoral Office, Kohima, has launched the state level workshop on awareness of VVPAT.
With the general election slated in 2018 and realising the need to update the media people on how the VVPAT operates and functions, kicking off the launching programme, a workshop with the media was held at Hotel Japfü on November 10.
Nagaland has the record of being the first state in the country where the Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail was first used in the by-election of the 51 Noksen Assembly Constituency in 2013 which proved to be a success.
It may be mentioned that VVPAT is an independent verification system attached with the Electronic Voting Machine (EVM) that allows the voters to verify that their votes are cast as intended and to detect possible election fraud or malfunction and to provide a means to audit the stored electronic results.
Highlighting on the advantages of VVPAT, Chief Electoral Officer, Abhijit Sinha, said the machine is to further enhance transparency and verifiability in poll process. He informed that henceforth, there will be no election without VVPAT.
Sinha has also informed that the department is ready for state-wide awareness in all the districts where the people will be made aware on how the machine works in all the local dialects. This, he stated, hopefully will ensure ethical and informed voting and also free, fair and peaceful election. CEO further informed that a similar workshop will be held for all the political parties soon.
Presenting in brief on how the VVPAT machine functions, Additional CEO, R Mhathung said the VVPAT is attached to the ballot unit of EVM and both the ballot unit and the VVPAT are placed in the voting compartment.
The VVPAT, he explained, has a small transparent glass window on it. When a voter comes to vote and presses the blue button on the Ballot Unit (BU) to vote for the candidate of his/her choice, the glass window on the VVPAT lights up and a printed paper slip containing the serial number, name of the candidate and election symbol of the candidate is visible to the voter behind the glass window. The voter witnesses all these details on the paper slip and is satisfied that his vote has been cast as intended.
He further informed that the printed paper slip remains visible to the voter through the transparent glass window for 7 seconds only, after which the printed slip gets automatically cut and falls into the sealed printed paper slip compartment/drop box of the VVPAT below followed by a beep sound. Thereafter the light goes off behind the glass window.
During the workshop, physical demonstration on how to vote with display on VVPAT machine was conducted by the master trainers.
