Delhi CEO office to issue public notice on May 11 to raise awareness on NOTA

A public notice will be issued by poll authorities here on Saturday to disseminate information to voters about the option of using NOTA (none of the above) if they wish to reject all candidates, the Delhi CEO said.

The NOTA button is located at the end of an EVM panel of a ballot unit, trailing the list of names of all candidates.

An electronic voting machine (EVM) consists of at least one ballot unit, a control unit and a VVPAT (voter-verified paper audit trail).

Each EVM panel or a ballot unit can accommodate names of a maximum of 15 candidates. So, in case of 15 candidates in a constituency, the 16th button would be of NOTA.

In case of more than 15 candidates, another ballot unit is added, and the NOTA appears at the end of the list of candidates on the second panel, and so on.

"On May 11, a day ahead of the election in Delhi, a public notice will appear in newspapers about the option of NOTA available to voters, which can be used by them without violation of secrecy of their decision," Delhi Chief Electoral Officer Ranbir Singh told PTI.

Asked if the notice will appear on social media accounts of the Delhi CEO office, he said, "Yes, we can put it up there as well".

Election in Delhi is slated to be held on May 12 on all seven Lok Sabha seats.

As many as 164 candidates are in the fray in Delhi, where the polls is largely being seen as a triangular contest among the AAP, BJP and the Congress.

In six of the seven constituencies, each polling station would have one control unit, two ballot units and a VVPAT, while in North West constituency, there would be just a single ballot unit along with a control unit and a VVPAT as there are only 11 candidates for that seat, the CEO had earlier said.

The NOTA, symbolised on an EVM by a black cross over a ballot, essentially allows a voter to reject all candidates if he or she does not want to cast vote to any contestant, but the vote is counted in the polling process.

Of the over 1.43 crore voters in Delhi, 78,73,022 are male and 64,42,762 female, while 669 belong to the third gender. The number of overseas electors stands at 40 while count of service voters is 11,005.