Charges Of EVM Tampering Baseless: Telangana CEO

Rejecting as baseless the charges made by the opposition parties that the EVMs were tampered with and that several lakhs of votes were deleted, Telangana Chief Electoral officer (CEO) Rajat Kumar today maintained that the election process was completely fair and peaceful, and without any untoward incident.

Speaking to the media at the Secretariat on the last day of the Model Code of Conduct, Kumar also said that the number of names deleted from the voters' list was in the order of hundreds or maybe thousands, but not 20 lakhs as was being claimed by some of the political parties.

He said that as per the established procedure the EC had removed some 26 lakh names as they were either duplicate or wrong or because the individual had shifted or had died, and had enrolled 20 lakh new voters in the voters' list. He also said that it was the responsibility of the citizens to check their names in the list, and to enroll their names in the voters' list online if their names were either missing or if they were first time voters.

Kumar also thanked Telangana Chief Secretary S K Joshi, DGP Mahender Reddy and other officials, who he said played a critical role in ensuring that the elections for the 119 Telangana Assembly constituencies were conducted peacefully.