Everything Counts

Hyderabad: The fate of 443 candidates in fray for 17 Lok Sabha segments in Telangana will be decided on Thursday. The counting would begin at 8 am and by noon trends would start flowing in. Results will start coming in only after 2 pm on Thursday as the mandated verification of VVPAT (voter-verified paper audit trail) slips in five EVMs per assembly constituency would have to be completed.

The poll body at present matches VVPAT slips of 4,125 EVMs under the "one EVM per Assembly segment" guideline. Following the recent Supreme Court order, the Election Commission will have to count the VVPAT slips of five times as many machines in each constituency, or that of 20,625 EVMs.

The officials of the Election Commission said that the counting of VVPAT slips per EVM will take up to 30 minutes to 45 minutes. It requires at least two hours to complete the process of the verification of the VVPAT slips from the randomly selected EVMs in every assembly segment. If the agents represented by the contestants challenged the authenticity of the verification of the VVPAT slips, the recounting of the slips will be taken up again and the declaration of winners would get delayed.

After the tallying of VVPAT slips physically with EVM count is completed, the authorities will declare the winners. Telangana CEO Rajat Kumar said so far there was no difference in EVMs and VVPATs and it may crop up if mock polling slips from the VVPATs are not cleared. Before the counting of votes begins, the polling staff will verify whether mock polling slips are cleared, he said.

As per the Election Commission guidelines, the officials take up counting of postal ballots first, EVMs next and then five VVPATs. The officials will take up counting of 14 machines in first round using 14 tables in all Assembly segments. However, he said 18 tables were arranged in two halls in Nizamabad segment with 36 EVMs.