The Election Commission must ensure that “the ordinary voter is satisfied that the [election] process is free and fair and that the incidents of booth-capturing or rigging or tampering with machines are reduced to the level of the insignificant,” the Madras High Court observed on Wednesday.
The court made the observation while passing interim orders on a writ petition filed by the DMK seeking tighter security measures in the ensuing Assembly election.
Chief Justice Sanjib Banerjee and Justice Senthilkumar Ramamoorthy doubted whether it was necessary to instal mobile phone jammers, as insisted upon by DMK, around the strong rooms where Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) were to be stored after polling. “It does not appear that EVMs are such that can be tampered without touching them. To the best of this court’s knowledge, EVMs may not carry any chips that may be accessed without touch,” the judges said.
Nevertheless, they directed the Election Commission to express its considered view on such aspect by way of a counter affidavit on Monday. The Bench also said that senior counsel P. Wilson, representing the petitioner party, had made out a strong case for installation of CCTV cameras around the strong rooms so that the EVMs could be stored under a fool proof security system and no unauthorised access could be made possible at such sensitive places.
The DMK had complained that the Commission had so far not conducted any meeting with recognised political parties on the issue of identifying the critical polling booths and vulnerable areas, which were prone to incidents such as booth capturing and rigging. Hence, the court directed the commission to hold such meeting in the course of this week, obtain inputs from those parties and then take a considered decision after due deliberations.
“It would have been better if a specific date had been notified much earlier for the consultation process to be conducted. There is no doubt that political parties may have a better feel for which of the areas may be vulnerable or which polling station may be critical… A list of the critical polling booths and a list of vulnerable areas must be indicated by the Election Commission in the counter affidavit that is to be filed in this matter on March 29,” the court ordered.
The first Division Bench went on to order that “if police or paramilitary forces are brought from outside the State to augment the resources here, such personnel must be deployed in an equitable basis and may be allotted particular critical booths or vulnerable areas so that the influence of the local personnel, who may owe political allegiance to one group or the other, may be minimised.”
As for installation of cameras inside polling booths and web streaming the proceedings without compromising secrecy in voting, the court said: “Since the Election Commission has itself proposed the idea of videographing postal ballots… it is expected that videography of critical polling booths, the possible web-casting of what actually goes on inside and installation of CCTV would be in much greater extent in the ensuing elections than earlier.”
