Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar on Sunday countered the Opposition's 'vote chori' charges against the Election Commission. Addressing a press
conference, Kumar explained the issue of duplicate Electors Photo Identity Cards (EPICs) and assured that the Election Commission of India (ECI) had taken measures to protect the rights of voters while resolving such cases. "Duplicate EPIC can be in two ways. For example, a person in West Bengal has an EPIC, and a person in Haryana has the same EPIC number. One EPIC number, two people in different states. When these questions were raised, from March we discussed this and solved this around the country. About 3 lakh people were found to have the same EPIC. So we changed this. So one number doesn't belong to two people," said CEC Kumar. "The other duplication is when one man has an EPIC in two different states. The first was solved by us. But in the second, we received complaints and investigated. For example, one person would have one EPIC back in his home village. If he migrates to Delhi or Mumbai and takes a card there, then one card needs to be cancelled in this case," he further explained.
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'EC stands with voters like a rock': CEC
The CEC stressed that the Commission moved carefully to avoid errors while updating the electoral rolls. "Before 2003, since technical facilities were not available, many people who migrated and went to different places, their names come up in many places. Then a question arose, that today there is a website, there is a computer, you can select it and remove it. But I wanted to tell you the same thing, the Election Commission stands with the voters like a rock. So, if this is done in a hurry, then any voter's name can be deleted wrongly. Someone else's name will be deleted in your place," Kumar asserted.
Levelling allegations of "vote chori", Leader of Opposition in Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi had on July 31, through a presentation at a press conference, cited data from the 2024 Lok Sabha polls to claim that over 1 lakh votes were "stolen" in Mahadevapura assembly segment in Karnataka through five types of manipulation, including duplicate voters, fake and invalid addresses and single-address voters.
The chief electoral officers of several states had asked Gandhi to file an affidavit under oath on his claims, but he had refused to do so.
(With agency inputs)
