North Paravur, formerly known as Parur is a town, municipality formed in 1912 Ernakulam district of Kerala. It is an old and growing municipality.
Middle aged amongst us would remember that it was all paper elections in our country. It was paper ballots. Those days, the voter on entering the Polling booth would be given a ballot paper. The elector would use a rubber stamp and cast his vote in the allotted box near the symbol of the candidate. The ballot paper would be folded and inserted into a ballot box, which would be sealed at the end of elections and taken to Counting centres. At times there were complaints of snatching of ballot papers, mass rigging, and casting bogus votes by groups of persons. Life has changed since.
EVMs were first used in our Country almost 40 years ago in Parur assembly elections in Kerala, which was meant to be an experiment. Congress candidate at the time, A.C. Jose, moved the Supreme Court to challenge the use of EVMs after he lost the election to Sivan Pillai of the Communist Party of India. Parliament consequently amended the Representation of the People Act 1951 in December 1988 to introduce a provision, Section 61A, that empowered the Election Commission to use EVMs.
India’s multiphase voting concluded on Saturday after seven
rounds of elections over 44 days. The giant electoral exercise – the largest in
democratic history – saw 15 million polling staff travelling the length and
breadth of the vast country to conduct the vote at about 1 million polling
stations, many of which were located in remote villages, hills, deserts and
conflict zones. Perhaps
for the first time, every party seems to be happy with EVMs and none is
complaining.
The Election Commission of India (ECI) developed these machines in collaboration with Bengaluru-based Bharat Electronics Ltd and Hyderabad-based Electronic Corporation of India Ltd, both government-owned companies. EVMs are battery-powered, so electricity is not needed for their functioning. They are not connected to the internet.
Since there are several assembly constituencies within a parliamentary constituency, vote counting for each assembly segment takes place in a single hall where 14 tables (or more if need be) are set up and control units of EVMs are distributed among the tables. The control unit of the EVM contains a “Results” button to display the number of votes each candidate received. It also shows the total number of candidates per constituency. When the Results button is pressed, the EVM displays votes secured by candidates one by one, indicated by beep sounds. The control unit shows “End” after the candidates’ vote numbers are displayed.
With all of India’s 640 million votes counted following the six-week-long election, the world’s – and history’s – largest democratic exercise has thrown up a result not so flavoured by Exit polls. The governing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modiji won 240 seats, falling short of the 272-mark that signifies a majority in the Lok Sabha, the lower house of India’s Parliament, which has 543 seats in all. With its allies, the BJP has still secured a majority, winning 293 seats and is all set to form the Govt again for the third time.
Though there is a false narrative spread as though BJP for the first time has failed to reach the required nos. here is the empirical evidence of how it has been. For 7 Lok sabha elections from 9th to 15th the largest party that formed the Govt had only fallen short of 50% mark. Here is the list to see for yourselves – marked in Yellow is above 50% - majority on its own.
Purely intended to be a Statistical post and not political post –
any hate-filled remarks will be removed and its author blocked
With regards – S Sampathkumar
6.6.2024
Sources : Party position : ECI; Stats of Elections - wikipedia
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