New Delhi:

Chief Election Commissioner Rajiv Kumar on Saturday said the Election Commission of India has prepared a technology to connect multiple EVMs and hide per-station voting patterns, but the time has not yet come to implement the idea.

At a press conference announcing the election, Mr Kumar also mentioned that the polling panel was looking into remote voting technologies such as blockchain.

Accumulators are a technique for connecting multiple polling machines and combining the results.

“But here, people don’t have confidence in the results of a machine,” Mr. Kumar said.

“For the political system to mature itself, you need to introduce accumulators. We are ready, the technology is ready, but it must work across the entire field. Let it mature further,” he said.

Votes in Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) are counted on a polling station basis, resulting in voting patterns being known across different districts or districts.

To solve this problem, EVM manufacturers Electronics Corporation of India Ltd and Bharat Electronics Ltd developed accumulator technology that can be used to take the results of 14 EVM groups without Reveal the voting results of a single EVM. machine.

The device was manufactured more than a decade ago but has not yet been used, pending government approval.

The poll panel also repeatedly rejected the idea that EVMs should be manufactured by other companies as well, saying it involves public belief and should be done by only two PSUs.

Before the introduction of EVM, ballots were often mixed in buckets to prevent voter intimidation by disclosing voting patterns.

Mr Kumar said the poll panel has also prepared a prototype to enable migrant workers to vote remotely and is looking into blockchain technology to enable remote voting in the future.

“We have prepared machines to get votes from migrant workers – remote voting – and the prototype is ready. The machine can put 72 assembled parts together, which is a step towards remote voting. We are also preparing to vote at a certain date There will be phases of remote voting via blockchain…but getting these things to take time to adjust. Every idea has its time, and maybe the time for this idea hasn’t come yet,” he said.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)