The Election Commission after a preliminary inquiry into the Congress’s allegation of large-scale errors in Madhya Pradesh voter’s list, has clarified that there are no discrepancies in the voters’ list. The EC said that the field verification showed that the charges made by the Congress were not true.
The Congress party had appealed to the Election Commission on June 3 seeking its intervention. The party also had alleged that BJP had deliberately registered 60 lakh fake names. It also submitted evidence to back its allegation.
The allegations levelled by Congress and its leader Jyotiraditya Scindia were widely discussed and aspersions were cast on the Election Commission and also the BJP.
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In a letter to AICC, the poll body said, “The allegations of large-scale entries of multiple voters in these assembly constituencies are not borne out”. It said image repetition found was “not related to multiple entries”.
“We have provided evidence to the Election Commission that there are approximately 60 lakh fake voters registered in the voting list. These are not merely mistakes. The lists have been deliberately altered at the behest of the BJP government in the state,” Congress leader Kamal Nath said.
The EC immediately set up four teams to visit the Assembly seats of Narela, Bhojpur, Hoshangabad and Seoni-Malwa to conduct a preliminary inquiry into the allegation. The four teams submitted their report to the Commission on Thursday.
In Seoni Malwa, of the 2,442 entries that Congress alleged were similar across polling stations in the same seat, 2,397 were found to be genuine voters. The remaining 45 are being deleted for reasons such as the voter having shifted or died.
In Narela, out of 22,252 entries cited in Congress complaint, 17,684 were found to be unique.
In Hoshangabad, 552 entries mentioned in the complaint were checked and no discrepancies were found.
In Bhojpur, EC verified 36 cases and found 29 to be genuine. In seven cases the process of deletion has been already on as part of the commission’s continuous updating exercise.
The EC concluded that “the allegation of large-scale entries of multiple voters in these four Assembly constituencies is not borne out”. The EC also clarified that, “In addition to the complaint of duplication in the voters’ list, it was pointed out that there has been unexplained growth in the electors in the state of Madhya Pradesh as the EP (elector-population) ratio which used to be 52.76% in 2008 increased to 61.45% in 2018. This has been seen from the perspective of the census data, nothing unusual could be noticed,” EC’s letter to Congress states.
The elections to the Madhya Pradesh legislative assembly will be held in November this year. The Congress party leader Jyotiraditya Scindia had alleged that BJP is behind the increase in the number of fake voters in the state. The social media had reacted in rather an unusual way and schooled him about the logic of his allegations.