Telangana polls: EC allows candidates to deploy monitoring teams at EVM strong rooms

Telangana polls 2018: Activists and senior Congress leader Marri Shashidhar Reddy have alleged that many names were deleted on purpose by the former state government and the EC without informing voters

In a significant development, Rajat Kumar,chief electoral officer (CEO), Telangana, permitted contesting candidates to deploy their teams at strong rooms where electronic voting machines (EVM) have been kept after polling concluded on 7 December. The opposition Congress, said that there is a fear among the opposition alliance that EVMs could be tampered, and hence made the representation to the CEO on the issue.

“There are spare EVMs which can be misused by the state government. Those machines can be used to replace the ones in which the Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS) feels that the opposition alliance is ahead,” said Telangana Pradesh Congress Committee (TPCC) treasurer Gudur Narayana Reddy, who said that he had submitted a representation to the Kumar on Saturday night on the issue.

Reddy added that candidates belonging to the Congress and its alliance partners have deputed teams to ensure that no such incident takes place.

When contacted, Kumar said that the ECI welcomed transparency. Asked if he had received any complaint on the issue, the CEO however stated that he was not aware of any complaint made on the issue. The election results will be declared on 11 December, along with four other states of Mizoram, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh.

While the elections passed-off peacefully for most parts, there was widespread criticism from citizens who found their names missing from the electoral rolls in spite of having voted in 2014 while in the same addresses. The names included national badminton champion Jwala Gutta, who tweeted that she and her father’s names had been deleted from the rolls, while her mother’s was not.

The matter pertains to the period between 2015 and mid-2018 when about 22 lakh names were deleted from the electoral rolls, for various reasons, including weeding out bogus and dead voters. From 2.83 crore in 2014, the numbers were down to 2.61 in September due to the deletions. However, after the EC took up its final revision of electoral rolls, the number of voters stood at 2.8 crore before polling.

Activists and senior Congress leader Marri Shashidhar Reddy have alleged that many names were deleted on purpose by the former state government and the EC without informing voters, something that Kumar’s office denied and said that citizens had ample time and chances to check if their names existed in the electoral rolls.

In this assembly elections, chief minister K. Chandrashekhar Rao-led TRS is facing the Congress-led grand alliance comprising the Telugu Desam Party, Communist Party of India and the Telangana Jana Samithi. While Rao has claimed that he will win close to 100 seats, Congress leaders expressed confidence of winning about 80 seats.

Source