E-Paper
Punjab assembly elections: 899 polling booths in Mohali to have webcast facility
The live webcast facility will enable officials to monitor proceedings of the February 20 Punjab assembly elections in real time
Out of the district’s total 907 polling booths, 899 will have a live webcast facility, enabling real-time and remote monitoring of the proceedings during the February 20 state elections.
Webcasting involves uploading the video feed through a webcam to a central cloud server that can be used by election officials to monitor polling booths in real time.
Deputy commissioner-cum-district election officer (DEO), Isha Kalia, “These measures are being taken as a part of the vulnerability mapping of polling stations in the district.”
According to the Election Commission of India (ECI) handbook issued to returning officers, the vulnerability mapping drive is “an exercise to identify the centres vulnerable to any threat, intimidation or interference”. The exercise helps officersidentify persons who are likely to spearhead such offences of undue influence.
The booths under webcasting have been identified on the basis of such parameters as low voter turnout, low elector photo identity card ratio or booths where there was 90% turnout, with 75% of the votes going to one candidate.
Mohali district comprises three assembly seats – Mohali (urban), Kharar and Dera Bassi.
96 model polling stations
To ensure maximum participation, the district is setting up 96 stations as model polling stations that will have facilities for differently-abled voters.
The model polling booths will have a lounge where voters can wait for their turn, besides drinking water and sanitation facilities. The booths will have illumination facilities in voting rooms, first-aid kits and creche for small children.
Each booth has been assigned a certain number of wheelchairs based on the number of differently-abled voters.
Booth-level awareness group (BAG) members have been requested to assist voters. Vehicles for pick and drop of differently-abled and senior citizens from home to the polling booth and vice versa have also been arranged in Mohali.
6 polling station to have women staff only
Mohali administration will be deploying only women staff at six polling stations in the district, two in each assembly segment.
The officials including police, election officers and other employees at these both will be all women. These booths have been dubbed the sakhi matdan kendras or the ‘pink booths’.
EVM’s already secured in the strong rooms
A total of 907 electronic voting machines (EVMs) have already been handed over to the sub-divisional magistrates of Kharar, Mohali and Dera Bassi and are secured in the strong rooms of the respective assembly segments.
EVMs were handed over after a randomisation process in the presence of leaders of all political parties. The idea behind the randomisation process is to ensure no prior knowledge of which EVMs will be allotted to which constituency or polling station.
For this, serial numbers of all EVMs under the jurisdiction of a DEO are listed. EVMs for a given constituency are then randomly selected through a computerised process known as first-level randomisation.
