A Delhi voter was detained at a police station for over three hours on Sunday after he complained that the paper audit trail slip did not match the electronic vote he had cast.
Milan Gupta, the southwest Delhi voter, said on Monday he was shocked at what followed his complaint. “They threatened me, saying that if my complaint proved untrue, I would be jailed,” Gupta said.
When he insisted on lodging a complaint, the officials asked for his wife’s phone number and spoke with her. Gupta’s wife had voted in the morning and was at home with their baby.
“She received four, maybe five phone calls, from different numbers — the call records will show this. The callers asked her to prevent me from making a complaint. They told her, ‘Woh jail jayega (He’ll go to prison)’.”
Rule 49MA of the Conduct of Elections Rules says that any voter complaining of a vote-paper slip mismatch can opt for a test vote. If they fail the test vote, they would be arrested, tried and, if convicted, jailed for up to six months with a possible fine of up to Rs 1,000.
“His (Gupta’s) complaint was found to be false,” said Azimul Haque, west Delhi returning officer. “He was handed over to the station house officer of the police station concerned.”
Haque disapproved of the polling officials’ efforts to dissuade Gupta from filing a complaint. “Under the law, they are (only) supposed to inform the complainant of the (penal) provisions that apply.”
During the test vote, which took place around 6pm after the day’s voting, Gupta declined to identify the party he had voted for on the ground of the secrecy of one’s ballot. He picked a button at random, and the paper slip matched.
“They told me I had been proved wrong and turned me over to the police,” Gupta said. “The police took me to the neighbourhood police station and kept me there for more than three hours, with no paperwork at all. At about 11pm, they said I could go home.”
Haque said: “He (the complainant) can choose any candidate. The test vote is recorded and deleted in the counting. He can only cast one test vote.”
A Supreme Court lawyer, Sunil Mathews, said Gupta’s detention without paperwork was illegal and seemed to be meant to intimidate him. He said the rule for punishing voters who complain about mismatches has been challenged in the Supreme Court.
“Such a rule is patently illegal and ought to be struck down by the Supreme Court,” Mathews said.
He said Gupta had never claimed that every vote on the particular voting machine was being registered incorrectly, so how could a single test vote prove or refute his contention about his original vote?
“Also, after a mismatch between the paper slip and electronic vote cast for a specific party, a test vote for another party cannot serve as (falsifying) evidence,” he said.
Many complainants have shied away from the test vote out of fear of prosecution since Ebin Babu, a Thiruvananthapuram voter, was arrested after failing a test vote last month.