New Delhi: The 6-week-long general election starts on April 19 and results will be announced on June 4. The voters, who comprise over 10% of the world’s population, will elect 543 members for the lower house of Parliament for a five-year term.
The polls will be held in seven phases and ballots cast at more than a million polling stations. Each phase will last a single day with several constituencies across multiple states voting that day. The staggered polling allows the government to deploy tens of thousands of troops to prevent violence and transport election officials and voting machines.
India’s Supreme Court Thursday reserved its judgment on the petitions seeking directions to tally Voter-Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) slips with votes cast through Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) during the elections. While voters in the United States and elsewhere use paper ballots, India uses electronic voting machines.
A Bench of Justices Sanjiv Khanna and Dipankar Datta during the hearing on Thursday remarked that everything cannot be suspected and the petitioners don’t have to be critical about each and every aspect of EVM.
The Court was hearing a batch of petitions seeking a thorough count of Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) slips in elections.
PM Modi first swept to power in 2014 on promises of economic development, presenting himself as an outsider cracking down on corruption followed by a thumping second win in 2019, when the BJP clinched an absolute majority by sweeping 303 parliamentary seats. The Congress party managed only 52 seats.
