Election dept. shows how VVPAT works

[caption id="attachment_232241" align="aligncenter" width="500"] Abhijit Sinha speaks during a workshop that was conducted to impart information concerning the use of the Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail, in Kohima on February 6.[/caption] Dimapur, Feb. 6 (EMN): Election officials in Nagaland conducted on February 6 a workshop to impart information concerning the use of the Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT). The event was conducted with members of political parties, in Kohima. The chief electoral officer of Nagaland, Abhijit Sinha said in his presentation during the event that the electronic voting machines (EVM) were first used in 1982 for the by-elections to the North Paravur assembly constituency in Kerala. They were engaged for a limited number of polling stations. The machine can record 2000 votes at maximum, he said. The officer said that using the VVPAT during the 2017 elections enhanced the process of EVM verifiability and transparency. He also informed that the technical experts committee (TEC) of the Election Commission had devised and designed the EVM and VVPAT secured with high security protocol. The project was in collaboration with two public sector undertaking namely the Bharat Electronics Ltd., at Bangalore and Electronic Corporation of India Ltd., at Hyderabad. During the seminar, the participants were given updates concerning the functions and process that go into using the EVM with VVPAT. The demonstration also included online access to electoral roll, registration, downloading etc. For further queries, one can log in to ceonagaland.nic.in and nvsp.in, he said.

VVPAT

The VVPAT, also ‘verifiable paper record’ (VPR) is a method of providing feedback to voters using a ballotless voting system. A VVPAT is intended to be an independent verification system for voting machines designed to allow voters to verify that their vote was cast correctly, to detect possible election fraud or malfunction, and to provide a means to audit the stored electronic results. It contains the name of the candidate and symbol of the party/individual candidate. The VVPAT offers some fundamental differences as a paper, rather than electronic recording medium when storing votes. A paper VVPAT is readable by the human eye and voters can directly interpret their vote. (Source: Wikipedia)