Karnataka Assembly passes Bill to switch to ballot paper for local polls amid BJP walkout

Opposing the Bill, Ashoka said the Congress was trying to seek solutions for its electoral losses. “If you lose using ballot papers, then will you say that EVM was right all along?” he asked. Calling it retrograde, he claimed that the switch would drag the election system back to the “stone age”. “The Government should withdraw the Bill,” the BJP MLA demanded.

Senior BJP leader Sunil Kumar said that going back to the ballot paper did not suit a progressive state. He also suspected “a conspiracy to misuse government machinery to rig the local body polls” behind the switch to the ballot paper. Another senior BJP MLA, S Suresh Kumar, said the Bill was politically motivated.

Countering the argument that ballot paper voting did not suit Karnataka’s tech credentials, Congress MLA Rizwan Arshad said the world’s most advanced countries prefer ballot papers for elections.

Arshad futher said the switch was required as the ECI refused to address concerns regarding EVMs and did not provide machine-readable voter rolls and CCTV footage of polling booths, despite repeated requests. “The Election Commission is the most manipulated organisation in the country today. It is a pawn of the BJP and supporting only the BJP,” he said.

Kharge said a “trust deficit” had crept into the voting process, alleging that EVMs were not transparent. He said that while any irregularities in ballot paper voting could be found out, EVMs had become a “black box”.

Unhappy with the Bill, Ashoka tore its copy and called the legislation “anti-democratic”. BJP MLAs walked out of the Assembly as the Bill passed.