Problem not with EVM or VVPAT but with counting: Sharad Pawar

Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) chief Sharad Pawar on Monday once again raised questions on the use of electronic voting machines (EVMs) and the voter-verifiable paper audit trail (VVPAT) machines and said he would discuss the issue with other opposition members in Delhi.

"The problem is not the with the EVM or VVPAT where the people vote, but with the machine with the electoral officer that is finally counted. We are going to go in depth into it now by discussing this with technnogists and experts and Opposition members in Delhi," he told party workers at a meeting here.

The meeting in Mumbai was organised on the 20th anniversary of NCP's foundation.

The party was founded on June 10, 1999, by Pawar, Tariq Anwar and P A Sangma after they were expelled from the Congress.

Pawar added that in future there might be problems if the people came to know that their votes were not going to the right candidate and asserted this could not be allowed to happen.

"If people realise that the vote they are casting is not going for their candidate of choice, they may keep calm now but they may take law into their hands in future. We should not allow that to happen," he said.

NCP also held an emergency meeting on June 1 to look into shortcomings behind the massive defeat in the Lok Sabha polls in Maharashtra. Besides chalking out a strategy for the Maharashtra Assembly elections that are due later this year was also discussed in the meeting.

The party received a crushing blow in the recently held Lok Sabha elections with the party just managing to win just four out of the 19 seats it contested from in Maharashtra.

Its ally, Congress, performed even more poorly as it could secure just two seats despite fighting on 25 seats in the state.