Totaliser is a proposed mechanism in the
voting machines in
India to hide the booth-wise voting patterns. A totaliser allows the votes cast in about 14 polling booths to be counted together. At present, the votes are tallied booth by booth.
Functioning
Bharat Electronics Limited,
Bengaluru
Bangalore (), officially Bengaluru (), is the capital and largest city of the Indian state of Karnataka. It has a population of more than and a metropolitan population of around , making it the third most populous city and fifth most ...
, and
Electronics Corporation of India Limited,
Hyderabad, developed the totaliser. Totaliser is an interface, which is connected to main control unit of a cluster of 14 EVMs and the consolidated count of votes cast for each candidate in that group of EVMs can be obtained by pressing the result button in the totaliser without disclosing the votes polled by a candidate area-wise.
History
A
Public Interest Litigation has been filed in Supreme Court in 2014 seeking a direction to the poll panel to mix up the votes cast in the various polling stations in a constituency, to prevent the candidates intimidating voters in areas that had rebuffed them.
Election Commission of India
The Election Commission of India (ECI) is a constitutional body. It was established by the Constitution of India to conduct and regulate elections in the country. Article 324 of the Constitution provides that the power of superintendence, di ...
initially suggested the measure to UPA Government in 2008.
During the
2014 Indian general election
General elections were held in India in nine phases from 7 April to 12 May 2014 to elect the members of the 16th Lok Sabha. With 834 million registered voters, they were the largest-ever elections in the world until being surpassed by the 2019 ...
, former Maharashtra deputy chief minister
Ajit Pawar
Ajit Anantrao Pawar (Marathi pronunciation: �d͡ʒit̪ pəʋaːɾ born 22 July 1959) is an Indian politician. He is the Leader of the Opposition in Maharashtra Legislative Assembly, and was the 8th Deputy Chief Minister of Maharashtra in his ...
allegedly threatened the voters that his party, the
Nationalist Congress Party, would be able to detect the voting patterns from the electronic voting machine readings and cut off their water supply if they snubbed it in
the constituency of Baramati. The Law Commission said the Totaliser would also help in situations such as that witnessed in
the constituency of Hoshangabad in 2014, where a lone voter voted at the Mokalvada polling station in the Sohagpur area. Before the introduction of electronic voting machines in India, ballot papers were mixed wherever necessary to prevent disclosure of the voting patterns.
In February 2017, NDA Government opposed totaliser in its affidavit in Supreme Court, while
Law Commission of India and the
Election Commission of India
The Election Commission of India (ECI) is a constitutional body. It was established by the Constitution of India to conduct and regulate elections in the country. Article 324 of the Constitution provides that the power of superintendence, di ...
had favoured the introduction of a totaliser.
Congress, NCP and BSP “categorically” supported its proposal to use ‘totaliser’ machine while BJP, Trinamool Congress and
PMK opposed totaliser.
See also
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Electronic voting in India
Electronic voting is the standard means of conducting elections using Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) in India. The system was developed and tested by the state-owned Electronics Corporation of India and Bharat Electronics in the 1990s. The ...
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Voter-verified paper audit trail
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Vote counting system
Vote counting is the process of counting votes in an election. It can be done manually or by machines. In the United States, the compilation of election returns and validation of the outcome that forms the basis of the official results is call ...
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Voting machine
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49-O
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NOTA
References
{{reflist
Electronic voting methods
Electoral fraud
Electoral reform in India