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Election Commission Of India logo.
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New Delhi: With the Election Commission claiming that the issues related to electoral rolls could have been addressed earlier if parties had raised it at the right time, Congress on Saturday alleged that the poll body has "crossed all limits of shamelessness" by shrugging off its responsibilities and it cannot put the onus on parties for catching vote theft.
Congress General Secretary (Organisation) KC Venugopal questioned whether actions like denying machine-readable rolls, taking down already uploaded machine-readable versions of draft rolls in Bihar, destroying CCTV footage after 45 days, insisting in Supreme Court that it is not bound to provide reasons deleting names from rolls and refusing to meet Opposition MPs were part of its agenda of promoting “utmost transparency”.
"The EC has crossed all limits of shamelessness by shrugging all its responsibilities in the face of grave allegations of vote theft and mass rigging. Constitutional authorities are expected to be the epitome of probity - not hide behind vaguely drafted press notes to hide their guilt in destroying democracy. The onus on catching the scale and volume of their vote theft cannot be on political parties and its BLAs," he said.
He was responding to a statement in which the EC said that if the parties and BLAs had raised issues with the electoral rolls, it could have been addressed earlier. The EC also said "utmost transparency is the hallmark of electoral roll preparation".
Venugopal claimed that the "tone and tenor" of the press statement issued by the EC raises "greater suspicions" that the poll body will "take no steps to address the public’s grave concerns about mass scale vote rigging done by the BJP-controlled EC".
"If the ECI 'welcomes the scrutiny of electoral rolls', the Chief Election Commissioner and other ECs must come clean on why they still refuse to provide parties with machine-readable electoral rolls and why CCTV footage is being deleted," he posted on 'X'.