Election Commission clears air on missing voters
There was no political or deliberate attempt to delete the names of 6.39 lakh persons.
By : DC Correspondent
Update: 2015-12-16 06:52 GMT
Hyderabad: The Election Commission has stated that there was no political or deliberate attempt to delete the names of 6.39 lakh persons from the electoral rolls of the Assembly constituencies falling under GHMC limits. The EC communicated this to petitioners Nagesh Mudiraj and Feroze Khan of the city who had moved the Hyderabad High Court for a direction to the TS government, GHMC and the State Election Commission not to make public the final electoral roll ward-wise with BC voters till a final decision was taken with regard to the alleged illegal deletion of the 6.39 lakh voter names from the electoral rolls.
The EC said that to ascertain facts regarding the allegations, the commission’s team visited TS from October 29 to November 2 and submitted its report stating that there was no deliberate attempt to delete the names from the rolls. Earlier, Justice C.V. Nagarjuna Reddy had directed the EC to take a decision on deletion of voters’ name by December 10 and communicate the same to the petitioners.
The EC stated that the TS Chief Electoral Officer took suo motu action to get the deleted names verified once again and as a result a total of 22,421 names were found to be deleted without due notice and of these 21,360 were restored. The EC said that it had directed the CEO not to delete any more names over and above the 6.39 lakh voters in view of local body elections in GHMC area.
The date of final publication of the electoral rolls in TS was extended up to March 11, 2016 from January 11, 2016. When the matter has come up for hearing on Tuesday, petitioners’ counsels told Justice Reddy that apart from the 6.39 lakh voters, an additional 7.9 lakh names had been identified for deletion. They said that if these votes were restored then reservation for BC communities would change.
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