Dasoju Sravan Urges Counting Of VVPAT Votes Too

Telangana Pradesh Congress Committee (TPCC) election campaign committee convener and the Praja Kutami candidate for the Khairatabad Assembly constituency Sravan Dasoju said that his party had submitted a representation to the Returning Officer (RO) of the Khairatabad constituency appealing for the counting of both the VVPAT printed slips and the EVM votes to cross-check and validate the votes polled in all the 238 booths in the constituency.

Dasoju said that that would avoid the impact of any malfunction or deliberate manipulation of the EVMs on the outcome.

He also said that he was ready to bear the expenses for counting the VVPAT slips, and that if both the VVPAT slips and the EVM votes were not counted, then the very purpose of introducing the VVPATs would be defeated, and a misinterpretation of the ECI norms could happen.

Dasoju said that in a majority of the polling stations, the polling which was supposed to commence at 7 am was delayed by 2-3 hours due to malfunctioning of the EVMs.

He also alleged that the names of several voters, who had the EPIC cards and had also found their names in the online list, were removed indiscriminately from the electoral rolls. And in some instances members of the same family were deliberately allotted different polling stations and Assembly constituencies, he said.

He claimed that the malfunctioning of the EVMs for two to three hours in targeted booths, and the deletion and misplacement of the names in the electoral rolls in almost all the polling stations was not an accident but a deliberate conspiracy to deprive him of his rightful victory.

He also raised serious concerns over media reports that claimed that the EVMs could be tampered with using Bluetooth technology, and appealed to the RO to install network jammers around the strong rooms to prevent the hacking of the EVMs.