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New Delhi: The Election Commission will hold an "unprecedented" press conference on Sunday, a day on which the I.N.D.I.A. bloc will launch its ‘Vote Adhikar Yatra’ in Bihar. The poll body also sought to find fault with the opposition parties over the inaccuracies in the voters lists saying if they had raised the issues earlier, it could have been addressed much before.
Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar and two Election Commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi will address the media and are expected to speak about the contentious Special Intensive Revision (SIR) in Bihar and allegations of the EC colluding with BJP for "stealing" votes.
The press conference will be at the National Media Centre in New Delhi on Sunday at 3 pm. The EC usually conducts press conferences only to announce the poll election schedule.
In a statement, the EC said the appropriate time to raise any issue with the electoral rolls would have been during the Claims and Objections period after publication of the draft list but the EC "continues to welcome the scrutiny by parties and any elector".
It will help Electoral Registration Officers (EROs), usually a Sub Divisional Magistrate-level officer, to remove the errors and purify the electoral rolls, it said.
"It seems that some political parties and their Booth Level Agents (BLAs) did not examine the electoral rolls at the appropriate time and did not point out errors, if any, to SDMs/EROs, DEOs or CEOs. Recently, some political parties and individuals raised issues about errors in electoral rolls, including the electoral rolls prepared in the past. Had these issues been raised at the right time through the right channels, it would have enabled the concerned SDM/EROs to correct the mistakes, if genuine, before those elections," it said.
The EC said the election system for Parliament and Assembly elections in India is a "multi-layered decentralised construct" as envisaged by law. The EROs prepare and finalise the electoral rolls with the help of Booth Level Officers (BLOs), who undertake the responsibility for the correctness of voters list.
It said draft lists are shared with parties and on the EC website and a month is provided for the filing of claims and objections. After the publication of the final voters list, digital and physical copies are again shared with all parties and published on the EC website with a provision for two-tier appeal process. "Utmost transparency is the hallmark of electoral roll preparation as per law, rules and guidelines," it added.
The EC and Opposition have been locking horns over the conduct of elections for some time and it has aggravated with the announcement of SIR in Bihar, which will be extended across the country in the coming months.
Claims of vote theft in Lok Sabha polls have also been raised by Leader of Opposition in Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi, who along with RJD leader Tejashwi Yadav would be leading the ‘Voter Adhikar Yatra’, besides raising doubts about Maharashtra and Haryana Assembly polls.
The press conference also comes days after the Supreme Court instructed the EC to provide the list of around 65 lakh voters which were not included in the draft electoral list prepared after the SIR with the reasons for the deletion of their names.
The 1,300 km yatra in Bihar would cover 22 districts between August 17 and September 1. Congress Media and Publicity Department Chairman Pawan Khera said, “We will not accept that the Election Commission becomes a compartment of this so-called ‘double engine’. We are fighting against this and will continue to do so in the future.”
“Whenever Rahul-ji has set out for a yatra, the democracy of this country has turned a page. 'Voter Rights Yatra' will be a historic march. It will prove to be a milestone in the history of our democracy,” he told reporters.
CPI(ML)L General Secretary Dipankar Bhattacharya claimed that the EC had earlier spoken about identifying a large number of illegal immigrants but has stopped speaking about it.
“It turned out to be a hoax and a false alarm,” he said while referring to an answer tabled in Parliament in which the Modi government said there were only three cases of foreigners being enrolled as voters till then. “Now an SIR is being conducted, but there is not a single case there,” he added.