But the Chief Election Officer, Uttar Pradesh also admitted in a statement that the commission received complaints of malfunctioning of VVPAT machines from 384 polling stations in Kairana following which replacement machines were used. The high rate of VVPAT malfunctioning contrasted with the relatively low failures in control and ballot units — only Bhandara-Gondia recorded more than a 1% failure rate among the PCs which polled. Similar reasons were attributed to the substantive number of VVPAT failures that were reported in other Assembly elections held recently. In the Karnataka Assembly elections, 1,702 VVPAT machines developing glitches during polling and others during testing, overall close to 4.2% of all machines. But the addition of the VVPAT has also increased the complexity of the otherwise simple single programmable chip-based device, rendering it more prone to glitches.

Source: The Hindu May 28, 2018 17:15 UTC