New Delhi: Just hours before declaration of results, the Opposition parties suffered a setback with reports suggesting that the EC has decided to stick to its plan of counting the paper trail machines slips at the end of counts and not in the beginning as demanded by them.
The Opposition parties had approached the EC on Tuesday to demand that the five random VVPATs in each Assembly segment should be counted first so that if there is a problem or a mismatch, the entire slips can be counted from the beginning itself.
For the first time in Lok Sabha polls, the EC will tally vote count on EVM with voter verified paper audit trail slips in five polling stations in each Assembly segment of a parliamentary constituency. On April 8, the Supreme Court had directed the EC to increase random matching of VVPAT slips with EVMs from one to five polling booths per Assembly segment. It will mean that out of nearly 10.3 lakh polling stations, the EVM-VVPAT matching will take place in 20,600 stations. The Commission is learnt to have also decided to count postal ballots simultaneously with EVM count.
