Kolkata: With West Bengal gearing up for next year’s crucial Assembly elections, training for checking electronic voting machines (EVMs) and voter-verifiable paper audit trail (VVPAT) units will begin Friday.
Engineers from the Electronics Corporation of India Limited (ECIL) will conduct the sessions, which will be attended by EVM and warehouse officers from all districts of the state.
The four-member central team of the Election Commission of India (ECI), which is currently on a four-day visit to West Bengal to review the ongoing Special Intensive Revision (SIR), is also expected to attend the first day of the training session Friday.
According to an official in the office of the Chief Electoral Officer (CEO), the requirement for EVMs and VVPATs in the 2026 Assembly polls will be significantly higher than in previous elections, owing to a nearly 17 per cent increase in polling booths compared to the 2024 Lok Sabha and 2021 Assembly polls.
“Typically, the total requirement of EVM and VVPAT machines is calculated on the number of booths plus 30 per cent reserve. Going by that calculation, the total requirement of EVM machines will be around 1.30 lakhs and an equal number of VVPAT machines,” the official said.
Explaining the reason behind the increase in the number of booths, the official added that, as per the directive of the ECI, this time the total number of voters in a single booth should not exceed 1,200, and hence, to accommodate that, the number of booths had to be increased.
The checking of the EVM machines has three phases. The first phase is whether the display on the machine is shown as “zero” after the machine is switched on. The second phase is to check whether all the buttons of the machines are functioning properly.
The third phase is to check whether the vote gets registered in favour of the symbol corresponding to the button pressed.
