Aurangabad
Putting to rest all speculation, Chief Election Commissioner OP Rawat on Thursday emphatically ruled out the possibility of holding simultaneous elections to the state assemblies along with the Lok Sabha polls anytime soon.

Rawat also said a legal framework was needed to be in place for holding simultaneous polls. There has been some speculation in the recent weeks that Assembly polls in Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Rajasthan and Mizoram, due this year-end, may be deferred and held simultaneously along with the Lok Sabha elections, scheduled for April-May 2019.

While the term of the Mizoram Assembly ends on December 15, those of Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan will end on January 5, January 7 and January 20, 2019, respectively. “Koi chance nahi” (no chance at all), Rawat told a select media meet in Aurangabad when asked if it was feasible to hold simultaneous LS and state Assembly elections in the near future.
His comments also come against the backdrop of BJP chief Amit Shah’s recent call for a “healthy and open debate” among stakeholders for simultaneous elections to the LS and the state Assemblies.

To a query on complaints of “failure” of the EVMs, Rawat lamented that in many quarters in India, the understanding of the EVM system “isn’t comprehensive enough”. “There is just a 0.5 to 0.6 per cent rate of failure and such a rate of machine failure is acceptable,” he said.