-The Indian Express For all their talk on farm distress, on agriculture, BJP, Congress show they have not learnt from past failures. We often feel proud of our democratic system. But it also has a shortcoming, which has been magnified in the current election season. The conversation today is not about what the BJP/NDA promised in its manifesto of 2014, and how far they have been able to deliver on their...

-The Hindu The NITI Aayog, in its reply to the Election Commission, is learnt to have denied the allegations of the Opposition parties that it helped Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s office get details of places where he was to hold rallies. The Commission had written to the NITI Aayog Chief Executive Officer seeking its response on the complaints lodged by the Congress and the Aam Aadmi Party. They had alleged misuse of...

-The Hindu Section 56-D of the Conduct of Election Rules allows scrutiny of VVPAT slips in case of disputes. New Delhi: Although the Supreme Court and the Election Commission have not agreed to the Opposition parties’ demand for 50% random physical verification of the Electronic Voting Machine (EVM) results with Voter-Verified Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) slips, they can still take recourse to Section 56-D of the Conduct of Election Rules to request...

-The Telegraph Supreme Court has rejected a review petition by 21 Opposition parties seeking paper slip counts on 50 per cent of VVPAT devices New Delhi: The plan to tally paper slips with the votes registered on 20,625 of the 10.35 lakh electronic machines deployed nationwide cannot guarantee the integrity of the electoral process against targeted tampering or machine malfunction, specialists have said. They have added that different sizes of random counts in...

-The Hindu The exclusion of migrants from the electoral process reveals the caste- and class-driven nature of mainstream politics While political commentators have been busy analysing voter preferences in the general election 2019, one segment, namely migrants, continues to be overlooked. The Election Commission of India (EC), on February 21, clarified that NRI voters cannot cast votes online, and that an NRI who holds an Indian passport can vote in his/her hometown after...