The Sunday Express trails an Electronic Voting Machine on its 24-hour poll journey from a strongroom in North Delhi to a booth in Chandni Chowk and back

Let’s call it ‘Chhattis’. That’s 36 in Hindi. Electronic Voting Machines don’t have names, only unwieldy identification numbers. So, let’s go with Chhattis, the number of the polling booth in which it was kept on May 7, election day in Delhi and six other states. But the journey to the booth inside the Dharamshala of Munna Lal Jain in Chandni Chowk, Delhi, began a day before, on the night of May 6.

May 6, 11.50 p.m.

Armed policemen guard the road leading to Aryabhatt Polytechnic in Shakti Nagar, North Delhi. Here, the EVMs are stored in sealed strongrooms that will be opened soon. On the college lawns, a few men lounge on plastic chairs, others walk about purposefully with files under their arms. Chhattis is in a room marked ‘AC No 20’, one of the 10 rooms where EVMs for the 10 assembly constituencies of the Chandni Chowk Parliamentary Constituency have been kept.

May 7, midnight

The crowd of polling officials and workers gets restless. “AC number 20”, someone shouts with the shrillness of a town-crier. The lock is unsealed and the doors flung open. The yellow lights of the corridor stream into the windowless room—the first flash of light in the room since it was sealed on May 2, after the EVMs were checked and names of the candidates entered into the control units of the machines.

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