Amid the raging controversy over Electronic Voter Machines, Chief Election Commissioner Sunil Arora on Thursday ruled out a return to the era of ballot papers and made it clear that EVMs will be used for the upcoming 2019 general elections.

“There is no way that we are going back to paper ballots. We are sticking with EVMs,” he said at an event in the national capital.

The statement comes just a couple of days after a war of words between the opposition parties and the ruling BJP was triggered by a ‘hackathon’ was conducted in London by a self-professed cyber expert. The “cyber expert”, Syed Shuja, had claimed that the 2014 Lok Sabha elections were rigged in favour of the BJP by remotely hacking the EVMs.

Dismissing the claims as unfortunate, Arora said that elections conducted since 2014 had thrown up various winners, so to attribute the results to EVMs is wrong. “If result is ‘X’ then EVM is fine, if not then EVM is faulty. EVMs are not a football,” he said.

The CEC said that EVMs have been used in India for over two decades now, and to address concerns of political parties, VVPAT system was also introduced to increase transparency. “We will never tolerate any discrepancies. We have never tolerated it even if the instances were small or few,” he added.

West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee had recently announced that a four-member committee of opposition party leaders was formed after reports of EVM manipulation by the BJP.

In addition to evaluating the functioning of EVMs and finding ways to stop any malpractice, the committee will suggest electoral reforms to the Election Commission before the Lok Sabha polls, Banerjee said.