Officials to create awareness on functioning of EVMs

Khammam : District Collector R V Karnan on Monday directed officials of departments concerned to create complete awareness on the functioning of electronic voting machines and VVPATS keeping in view the upcoming Assembly elections.

He was addressing a constituency wise training session for the district level master trainees to understand the functioning of voting machines and VVPATs at Pragna Conference Hall in Khammam.

The District Collector explained the functioning of voting machines and VVPATS to the officials through power point presentation. He said that the BHEL and ECL companies manufactured the EVMs and VVPATs using advanced and modern technology and these machines cannot be hacked or tampered with. To remove certain doubts in the people’s mind regarding voting machines, awareness programmes must conducted in every village and locality of each constituency across the district, he added.

Through VVPATs the people can know to which candidate they voted for along with the serial number of the candidate; his name and symbol along with date and time of voting to the candidate. The voter can see such details for a period of seven seconds through VVPATs and later the slip with that details will be dropped in the VVPAT drop box automatically which is sealed, informed the Collector.

The inspection of voting machines and their functioning will be done under the supervision of well trained engineers, added the Collector. He further added that the officials who are deployed for the election duty must check settings of ballot units along with the details of the candidates who are contesting in that particular constituency.

Zilla Parishad Chief Executive Officer Marapaka Nagesh, District Agriculture Officer Jhansi Lakshmi Kumari, District Education Officer Madan Mohan and Master Trainees of five constituencies of the Khammam district attended the meeting.