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EVM snags, confusion, protests mark MCD polls

Staff Reporter

Voting was very slow in the beginning, picked up in afternoon

DATE WITH BALLOT: A couple on their way to cast votes for the MCD polls at a polling station in the Nizamuddin area of the Capital on Thursday.

NEW DELHI: Technical problems with some electronic voting machines, resultant protests and stray incidents of violence marked polling for 272 wards of the Municipal Corporation of Delhi on Thursday. The elections for the first time were held with EVMs and 92 seats were reserved for women after the delimitation exercise.

As the polling began at 8 a.m., several booths across the city witnessed malfunction of EVMs. Though only a small fraction of the 10,200 EVMs developed snags, it was enough for voters and candidates alike to cry foul. At Bawana in North-West Delhi some persons smashed EVMs at Naveen Public School. There were strong protests by residents who alleged that there was deliberate tampering with EVMs that catered to a particular area, while elsewhere in the area the machines functioned normally.

At Maujpur in Outer Delhi, an independent candidate Ahmed Ali Khan got a shock when he discovered that instead of the "aeroplane" symbol that had been allotted to him and with which he had campaigned, the symbol on the voting machine against his name had been changed to a "fan".

In violation of the State Election Commission guidelines, ration cards were permitted to be used at Maujpur for casting of votes. At Laxmi Nagar in East Delhi, the situation was even worse. The Rashtriya Janata Dal candidate Kamal Hasan alleged that election officials were allowing people to vote without any identity proof if agents of political parties permitted them to do so.

While voting was very slow to begin with and only about 8 per cent votes had been cast in the first three hours, it picked up later.

At some places like Nizamuddin, candidates also went around urging the voters to come out and vote. Mayor Farhad Suri said efforts should be made to get the literate masses to exercise their right to franchise.

In Jamia there was a lot of confusion and consequently protests as the polling booths for certain areas had changed. Here candidate Aatif Mohammad charged that people had not been informed correctly about the booths in which their votes existed.

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