PANJIM: The office of the Chief Electoral Officer (CEO) of Goa, Kunal conducted an awareness-cum-demo programme for the political parties, district election officer, returning officer (RO)/assistant returning officer (ARO) and media on Pre-First Level Checking (P-FLC) of M3 Electronic Voting Machines (EVM) and the Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) by Pre First Level Checking Unit (PFLCU) at Altinho on Thursday.
CEO Kunal, IAS, Additional Chief Electoral Officer Narayan Sawant, IAS; Joint Chief Electoral Officer Aisha Vaingankar; Ruchika Katyal, IAS DEO, South District; Mamu Hage, IAS, Additional Collector North and Deputy CEO Sangeeta Naik were present on the occasion.
The CEO said that the use of the Pre-First Level Checking Unit (P-FLCU) would be taking place for the first time in Goa and Manipur in the upcoming general Assembly elections. The P-FLCU is an accessory unit designed to test EVM units like Control Unit (CU), Ballot Unit (BU) and Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) prior to the conduct of first level checks on pilot basis. It is used to capture diagnostic data from EVM/VVPAT units and to set the real-time clock data of CU. After checking by PFLCU, the entire process of first level checking (FLC) of EVM/VVPAT will occur.
The demonstration and briefing were presented by engineers of Bharat Electronics Limited Arshiya Khatoon and A Vamsi Krisha. They also highlighted various features of M3 EVM/VVPAT machines.
They have additional advanced technical features like UADM (unauthorised access detection module), self diagnostics for EVM’s health, strong mutual authentication of CU, BU and VVPAT, battery life prediction, catering 24 BUs with single CU to accommodate 384 candidates, etc.
