‘Fake narratives’ about voter turnout, EVM functioning could have led to anarchy: EC

Fake narratives were spread about discrepancies in voter lists, voter turnout data and the functioning of Electronic Voting Machines during the Lok Sabha polls that could have led to “anarchy”, the Election Commission alleged on Monday.

“We failed in understanding them [fake narratives], we admit it,” Election Commissioner Rajiv Kumar said at a press conference. “Now we have understood.”

Kumar said that the poll panel had expected fake narratives and “attacks from outside India” during the election process. “We had made arrangements for such situations, I cannot share the technical details, but the attacks came from within the country,” he said.

The Election Commissioner referred to the Supreme Court ruling in February that had closed proceedings relating to the alleged duplication of names in electoral rolls. The court had noted that adequate measures were in place for voters to approach the Registration Officer if their names were deleted or if the records had any errors.

Kumar said that after the polling began, another plea was filed in the Supreme Court seeking the tallying of all Voter Verified Paper Audit Trail slips to verify votes cast through Electronic Voting Machines. The petitioners in the case had alleged faulty functioning of the Electronic Voting Machines.

The chief election commissioner alleged that the plea could have given rise to “anarchy” in the country by casting doubts about the Electronic Voting Machines among the voters and poll officials.

“A similar plea was also filed exactly four days before phase one of polling in 2019,” Kumar said. “The petitioners could have raised this issue between 2019 and 2024 as well. There is a pattern, there is a design, I am not saying a toolkit but let us understand this.”

Kumar said that there was another case from 2019 regarding voter turnout data that was raised amid the polls. He said that the poll regulator had responded to the plea in 2022.

“The plea had alleged that we did not provide voter turnout data and inflated it by one crore,” he recounted, adding that the claims were baseless.

Non-governmental organisation Association for Democratic Reforms had in 2019 asked the Election Commission to release the booth-wise absolute number of voters.

However, the Election Commission told the Supreme Court that it had no legal mandate to publish Form 17C, which contains a record of votes recorded in an Electronic Voting Machine, and that the document could only be given to candidates or their agents.

Days after the Supreme Court hearing, the Election Commission on May 25 released the absolute number of votes cast in each parliamentary constituency during the first five phases of the Lok Sabha elections.

“Neither did we delay providing voter turnout data and nor did we increase any voter turnout data,” Kumar said on Monday.

Listing out “learnings” from this year’s election, the chief election commissioner said that polling should have ended a month earlier, and not during the peak of summer. At least 33 polling officials died in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar in the last phase of elections on June 1 due to extreme heat wave.

Will count postal ballots first: EC

The Election Commission on Monday said that it will begin counting of postal ballots half an hour before counting the votes cast by electronic voting machines.

“Given that the amount of postal ballots in most of the polling booths are less than votes cast by electronic voting machines, the counting of the former will naturally end earlier,” Kumar said

This came after a delegation of the INDIA bloc leaders on Sunday urged the Election Commission to revoke its 2019 guidelines, which removed the provision requiring returning officers to declare the postal ballot results before the final counting of the votes polled with the Electronic Voting Machines.

On May 18, 2019, the Election Commission withdrew the earlier guidelines, which said that the counting of votes polled with Electronic Voting Machines should be finalised only after the counting of postal ballots is completed. Instead, it told all chief electoral officers that Electronic Voting Machine counting “can go on irrespective of the stage of postal ballot counting”.

On Monday, Kumar did not say that the results of postal ballots will be declared before the Electronic Voting Machine counting as sought by the Opposition. He only cited the postal ballot scheme rule that allows its counting to begin earlier.

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