Maharashtra Assembly elections 2024: The Election Commission said on Tuesday (December 10) denied the Opposition's charge of discrepancy in VVPAT verification of votes in recently held Maharashtra assembly polls, saying that "no mismatch found in any VVPAT voter slips with their EVM numbers."
No discrepancy found
As per Supreme Court of India and Election Commission of India guidelines, the poll officials must count the VVPAT slips of randomly selected five polling stations per assembly constituency, which the commission did on November 23 to match it with the numbers in EVM. "Accordingly, VVPAT Slip count of randomly selected 5 polling stations per Assembly Constituency has been conducted on November 23, during the counting procedure, in front of the Counting Observer / Representatives of Candidates," the poll body said.
"As per that, slip count of 1,440 VVPAT units of 288 assembly constituencies of Maharashtra state has been tallied with respective control unit data," ECI said in a statement. "There is no discrepancy found between VVPAT slip count and EVM control unit count as per the reports received from the concerned DEOs. Due procedure laid by ECI has been followed," it added.
Congress delegation flags concerns over Maharashtra poll process
This comes a week after a Congress delegation met Election Commission officials in New Delhi and raised concerns over alleged inconsistencies in the electoral process for the Maharashtra Assembly polls, including the issue of large numbers of deletions and additions in the voters’ list.
The opposition party sought raw data from the poll panel to ascertain facts.
The Congress on November 29 raised with the EC “serious and grave inconsistencies” that it said were being revealed in the data relating to the polling and counting processes for the Maharashtra polls and sought an in-person hearing to present relevant evidence.
In a memorandum to the poll panel, AICC Maharashtra in-charge Ramesh Chennithala, Patole and AICC general secretary Wasnik had said “these glaring inconsistencies”, which struck at the very root of a transparent, free and fair electoral system, were not based on any biased motive or farfetched presumptions but had been extracted from the information made publicly available by the Commission.
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