During the second.phase of the ongoing LS elections, there have been complaints from many booths in kerala about slow polling , mal function of EVMs, bogus voting etc. I would like to.comment on all these from my own experience as a voter who cast his vote in the first 30 minutes of polling.
It is really a matter of shame that even after more.than 40 years since introduction of EVMs in elections, the Election Commission has not been able to ensure error free function on the machines. Admitting the face that being a machine it can fail any time, I wonder why the commission had not taken suitable steps to ensure standby arrangements to face such machine failures. Being a time bound procedure, we cannot afford to spend time to get the machine fault rectified by technicians. Arrangements should have been there to replace the faulty machines with stand by machines and save precious time. I pity those voters who were made to wait for hours during such technical faults. It is not clear whether the voting time was suitably extended in such booths.
From my experience in the booth, it was observed that the time taken by the machine to make a response was too long as the beep sound was heard after considerable lapse of time. It was also observed that the beep sound was very feeble , may be due to low charge of the machine. This was mentioned by me to the presiding officer.
Regarding the allegations of bogus voting, I fail to understand how an impersonator could cast a vote of another person using a duplicate id card, when the electoral rolls were having the photo of the voter. Is it not the responsibility of the polling official to tally the identity with the photo.available.on the rolls, I wonder. ( For that matter, I fail to understand why another photo id card is insisted on when the photos are available in the rolls)
