Online Counting Process will take 4 to 7 hours

All geared up: CEO I.V. Subba Rao at the mock counting exercise in Hyderabad on Sunday and monitors mock drill of counting process. The software for counting tested at 106 counting centres. Counting of votes simultaneously for Parliament and Assembly.

HYDERABAD: Counting would be completed in four to seven hours after the EVMs are taken out from strong rooms at 8.30 A.M on May 16 and round-wise results will be made available online on eci.gov.in.

The tally of votes polled by various candidates which is decoded from Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) on each table would be carried on a sheet of paper to the Returning Officer (RO) who will feed the data into the computer. The RO will log in to the computer under an exclusive password which will be furnished by the Election Commission of India. The password will be kept in the safe custody of RO and will not be accessed by anyone else for security reasons.

The EC which developed the software for counting was tested with hypothetical data at the 106 counting centres across the State on Sunday. Chief Electoral Officer I.V. Subba Rao monitored the mock drill at Kotla Vijayabhaskara Reddy indoor stadium here which houses the counting centres for Khairatabad and Jubilee Hills Assembly constituencies.

Fool-proof

The working of the software was presented to Mr. Rao on screen by the District Election Officer M.T. Krishna Babu and his staff. Also present was Commissioner of Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation S.P. Singh. The computer displayed the cumulative votes secured by candidates round-wise. The software did not accept mismatch in cumulative tally when wrong figures were deliberately fed to the computer.

Another feature of the software was that the RO of every Parliamentary constituency can see for himself online if the data was not updated by the ROs of Assembly segments within the former’s constituency.

Mr. Subba Rao said that the counting of votes would be done simultaneously on tables arranged in two rows, representing Assembly and Parliamentary constituencies.

A certain number of rounds were fixed for each Assembly constituency. For instance, counting would be done in 17 rounds for Khairatabad Assembly constituency.