The voters in the Raipur Lok Sabha constituency would have the privilege of verifying the vote they had cast in the coming general election.
The state election commission had made the arrangement to use the Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail system (VVPATS) in the Raipur Lok Sabha constituency that would go to the polls on April 24. The constituency would be first in the state to experiment the system.
According to commission officials, Raipur Lok Sabha constituency was one among a couple of constituencies where the VVPATS would be in use. For the first, the paper trail system was reportedly experimented in two assembly constituencies in Nagaland and Mizoram during the state polls.
The system, the commission officials added, would enable the voter to verify the vote he had cast.
Under this system, a slip of paper bearing the name and symbol of the party the voter had voted for would briefly appear for about 10 seconds. This would help the voter to see whether the button he had pressed was correctly recorded.
After the brief appearance, the paper would slip into a secure box, thus maintaining a paper trail of all the votes cast and the secrecy. Barring the voter, no one could verify whom he had voted for in the election.
With Raipur Lok Sabha constituency heading for a keen contest, the voters would have a new system to deal with. The BJP had fielded former information minister Ramesh Bais while Congress had pitted former state minister Satyanarayan Sharma against him.
The Congress had changed the Raipur candidate three times. Now with Sharma in the fray, the Lok Sabha constituency would see a close contest.
