In the recently concluded Haryana elections, during the counting of votes, it was found that many EVM’s had a 99% battery status.
The EVM’s India uses are battery backed. That is a requirement as the data is stored in memory of the EVM’s and if the EVM was to lose power, all the data would be wiped clean.
Think of it like a mobile. Now we all know that Mobile phones have to charged when they give you a low battery warning. If you don’t charge it, the mobile phone will drain to 0% and shut down itself.
EVM’s too are similar. They are charged just before the elections and then used during the voting process. Obviously, this consumes power. Even if we assume that the EVM was connected to a power source at the time of voting, they are later disconnected and transported to a central storage facility and then kept for many days, some times months altogether. It is thus normal for the battery power to discharge over the storage and transportation period. When the counting takes place, the EVM’s are analyzed without connecting to power.
In Haryana, many EVM’s were detected with 99% battery status. All such EVM’s had votes that favored the BJP. In other EVM’s, the battery was between 60 to 70%, which is normal. In these EVM’s, Congress was getting majority of the votes.
This takes us back to the mystery of the missing EVM’s. There have been reports in the past that many EVM’s have gone missing from the EC’s custody.
This 99% battery charge status thus makes the EVM’s suspect. Were they switched? Were they taken away after the election, then tampered with? Were they then replaced in the strong rooms after tampering?
These are all uncomfortable questions that the EC should answer. Will it answer them? Most probably not. It will try to justify this with some technical garbage.
The results in Haryana have surprised everyone including the voters. Perhaps for the first time it has shaken Congress too, which has been ambivalent on the question of EVM’s.
Civil Society has been running an active campaign against use of EVM’s and a return to ballot system but BJP would have nothing to with it.
It would serve readers to jog their memory and go back in time to the phase when one of the leaders of BJP, JVL Narsimha Rao wrote a book against the use of EVM. This book had a preface written by none other than L.K. Advani. Subramanian Swamy has been running a continuous campaign against the use of EVM’s.
There was no way that BJP could have won in J&K, therefore it perhaps did nothing to rig those elections. There was no way BJP could have won Haryana given the popular uprising against it, yet it won the state.
Will the EC do the same in the next two elections, give Jharkhand to Congress and fix the Maharashtra elections?
The mystery of 99% charged EVM’s remains.
Will the courts take any action? Highly unlikely, especially given that DY Chandrachaud is about to retire in November and the next in line CJI, Sanjeev Khanna is known to be close to the regime.
