A social worker in Uttar Pradesh has said that he and several hundred other voters in Lucknow, Barabanki, Sitapur and Hardoi districts will enter the
booths and demand ballot papers and walk out without voting if they are not
available.

“We have already informed the Election Commission of India about our plan while making it clear that we don’t trust the electronic voting machines and the black-glass
VVPATs,” Sandeep Pandey, the social worker, told a news conference in Lucknow on Saturday.

“If not provided with ballot papers, we will simply walk out of the booths without voting.”

Pandey had returned his Magsaysay Award last year in protest against
America’s approach towards Palestine. He had also returned all the degrees he
had received from American universities.

An IIT Kanpur graduate, Pandey has a dual MS in manufacturing and computer engineering from Syracuse University, New York, and a PhD in mechanical engineering from the University of California at Berkeley.

He runs schools for poor children and helps them improve their quality of life. Pandey helms the Socialist Party (India), whose members contest elections.

At the media conference, Pawan Kumar, who is contesting the Lok Sabha elections from Bhilwara, Rajasthan, as a nominee of the Right to Recall Party, demonstrated with the help of an EVM, a VVPAT machine and a laptop how votes can be “manipulated”. He said that whenever two voters push the same button, one vote goes to a party for which the machine has been programmed.

“While you will see in the VVPAT machine the picture of the symbol that you have pushed in the EVM, the print of another symbol will be generated if it has been programmed with mala fide intentions. The same will happen in the vote counting unit,” Kumar said.

“We don’t trust the VVPAT and the EVM and have many questions which the government has failed to answer. Why was the colour of the glass through which the voters see the picture of the symbol changed from transparent to black in recent years?

“And why was the timeto see the picture of thesymbol that you have pressed reduced from 14 seconds to 7 seconds? Why cannot they keep the light on during the entire period of voting and why does the VVPAT coughup the print of the slip when the light is off and the voter has left?”

The EC says it takes care to prevent any manipulation of the EVMs and VVPATmachines.