Bhopal (Madhya Pradesh): Electronic voting machines (EVMs) will be used in elections to urban bodies and ballot in three-tier panchayat elections as announced by state election commissioner Basant Pratap Singh on Thursday.
“It will take more than 3 months to conduct the elections of panchayats as well through EVMs, as the number of EVMs is limited. Therefore, it has been decided to conduct elections to panchayats through ballot boxes,” said the state election commissioner during a review of election preparations with the collectors through a video conferencing.
Singh said elections to urban bodies would be conducted in two phases and elections to panchayats would be conducted in 3 phases.
Speaking to collectors he said, “Both the elections have to be conducted simultaneously, so prepare in such a way that there should not be any kind of difficulty.”
Singh said if there was any problem, then they should tell him or the secretary, State Election Commission immediately.
He said after reviewing the sensitive and hyper-sensitive polling stations, the information should be made available to the commission soon. “Make full use of information technology in the election process. Give wide publicity to Election Mobile App for urban body elections,” he asked collectors.
The state election commissioner said, “According to the new provisions, the account of the election expenditure of the corporators should be systematically maintained.”
He said reserve EVMs should be kept safely at designated places only. All collectors should review the availability of election material, get the maintenance of polling boxes done and make all the preparations for ballot printing in advance.
Secretary, State Election Commission Rakesh Singh asked collectors to make appointments of returning and assistant returning officers and inform the Commission. They should also get the polling stations verified by the responsible officers and get them repaired as per the requirement.
“Organise meetings with political parties from time to time, make necessary arrangements by identifying the counting places and select master trainers for training at district, urban body and block level”, he asked the collectors.
