Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan

In Salt Lake, the model school for Bidhannagar Assembly Constituency had voters from Duttabad. There were snaking queues in all eight booths that there were at the school. “It was expected as Duttabad traditionally has a far higher voting percentage than the rest of Salt Lake,” said a polling official.

The booths were manned by women polling officials, most of whom were unaware that the school had been declared a model polling booth. “There is one thing worthy of a model,” smiled Suparna Biswas, a school teacher from Sreebhumi, serving as second polling officer at booth no. 234. “The bathrooms have fans,” she added, with a laugh.

But soon the laughter vanished as the EVM developed a snag. By then, just 375 of 1,198 votes had been polled. Names of the next five in the queue were crosschecked and cleared for voting. The sector magistrate and his assistant struggled to get the machine going. “Sir, look what I found,” the assistant said, holding out a piece of paper in hand. It was a voter slip of one Sarada Devi Rajak. She was found to be a 70-plus woman who had voted a while back. “The slip had been folded several times and inserted inside a slit in the VVPAT machine. It had almost gone in. I could spot just a corner by which I pulled it out,” the assistant said.

Officials try to repair the damaged electronic voting machine at Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan

A debate ensued on whether the act was a deliberate one to damage the equipment or whether someone had tried casting a ballot, remembering the pre-EVM way of inserting folded ballot papers in the ballot box. The five included a middle-aged couple. “Do not leave now. You will have to queue up again from the start. Remember, it took us two hours to reach this room,” she said, assuring him that they would be out in five minutes once the machine worked.

Many in the corridor sat down on the floor. Some at the head of the queue said they were waiting since 9am. Voting had been stopped for about one hour when finally an engineer arrived. She gave it a try and then decided in favour of a change in machine. “The rule is to change the whole set of machines if one does not work,” said the sector officer to the polling agents from the parties.

“There are five of us engineers dedicated to this sector. I have already tended to six calls this morning. But this is the first time the set needed to be changed,” said Pallavi Bharti, the young engineer who works for the Electronics Corporation of India in Hyderabad. The votes inside would stay intact, she assured the officials and left. Once a round of mock polling was conducted in the presence of the polling agents, voting resumed after a break of an hour and a half. The clock was inching past 1pm by then.

The Newtown School

The only indication that The Newtown School was a model booth was the pink balloons arched up as a decoration at the entrance. Inside, voters were quite annoyed.

“Why aren’t the fans working?” asked Sipra Saha, an AC Block resident who had come out after voting and was waiting for her husband to finish. The forces had made separate queues for men and women. “The booth itself was air-conditioned but out here, even the fans aren’t working.”

Those nearing their turn at the booth said they had been waiting for two hours in the queue and every now and then the crowd broke into collective dissent.

Facing them bravely was CRPF sub-inspector Akhileswar Prasad, who spoke to them with folded hands.

“The reason for the crowd is that voters began lining up an hour before polling started, creating a backlog from the outset,” he said. “The queue was slated to be on the left but since it was spilling onto the street we veered it to the right. This space has fans above but they don’t work. This is not our lookout. Still, we got an electrician who worked for an hour and a half and fixed one, but it’s turning at a snail’s pace,” said the officer dressed in what looked like a rather thick uniform.