Akhilesh Yadav corners Govt. over 'faulty' EVMs

Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav on Tuesday lashed out at the government for the alleged failure of Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) and Voter Verified Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) in the Monday by-polls and demanded to bring back the ballot paper system.

"There is growing mistrust in people. They don't trust the machines anymore. And, what happened yesterday, how one machine, then two machines, then machines at a large scale turned out to be faulty. Therefore, we demand that the further elections should be conducted on the ballot paper," said former Uttar Pradesh chief minister.
He further demanded that people who were not able to vote due to the faulty machines should be allowed to vote again.

"Ballot paper will strengthen the democracy and the trust of people. We also hope that the people, who faced the problem, will get to vote again," he added.

Yadav also accused the state government of conspiring against the alliance of Samajwadi Party and Rashtriya Lok Dal, which have jointly fielded a candidate in the Kairana Lok Sabha by-poll, to influence the votes in their favour by EVM tampering.
"It is their strategy, that EVMs in the areas where the support for Samajwadi-RLD alliance was strong was faulty," he added.

He also talked about all other countries that hold election via ballot paper and urged all political partied to be united on this matter and talk about EVMs.

"Many democracies all over the world use ballot paper for elections. I will urge other parties to stand united on this. This is a big question for democracy, and these elections were a big eye-opener."

As the by-polls for four Lok Sabha seats and nine assembly constituencies were held on Monday across 10 states, reports of faulty EVMs emerged from many booths.
However, the Election Commission refuted the reports of failure of EVMs and VVPATs.

(ANI)