EC says Covid-19 precautions slowed down Bihar vote counting, but process remained glitch-free

The Covid-19 pandemic slowed down the process of counting of votes cast in the polling for the state assembly of Bihar, but the Election Commission on Tuesday claimed that the process remained free of any glitch.

“The commission has not been under any sort of pressure from any quarters,” the Secretary General of the EC, Umesh Sinha, said at a news-conference at 10:00 p.m. on Tuesday, even as the Congress and its ally the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) alleged irregularities in the counting of votes in some constituencies in the state.

The EC held a late-night press-conference at the Nirvachan Sadan in New Delhi after the RJD posted on Twitter a list of 119 assembly constituencies in Bihar, claiming that the candidates of the party or its ally Congress had already won the seats, but the Returning Officers appointed by the poll-panel were not issuing the necessary certificates declaring them winners.

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Chandra Bhushan Kumar, the Deputy Election Commissioner (DEC), dismissed the allegation, saying that the website of the commission were accurately displaying the results and the trends. He said that the results of the 146 seats had already been declared, while counting was still on for the 97 seats.

The EC officials earlier told the media-persons the counting of votes in Bihar was taking longer than usual due to several precautionary measures put in place to limit the chances of the elections contributing to further spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

They said that the EC had brought down the maximum number of voters allowed to cast votes in a polling station from 1500 to 1000 in order to avoid crowd and long queues and to make it easier to maintain social distancing norms required to limit spread of coronavirus. The number of polling stations thus increased from nearly 65,000 in the 2015 assembly polls to 1.06 lakh this year. This resulted in a 63 per cent increase in the number of Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) deployed in the polling stations as well.

The EC had arranged counting at 38 locations in Bihar during the 2015 assembly elections in the State. But it held counting in 55 locations this year. Besides, the number of counting tables placed in every hall was also reduced to seven from the usual 14, said the officials of the poll-panel.

The EC top brass told journalists at 1:30 p.m. that its officials had by then completed counting of around one crore out of the total 4.16 crore votes cast in the three phases of polling in Bihar. They again updated the journalists at 6 p.m. stating that 2.7 crore of the 4.11 crore votes polled in the state had been counted till 5.30 pm.