Bengaluru: The confusions and debate pertaining to the 2019 general election vote counting being not accurate is still on in the political fraternity. Now, the Karnataka State Election Commission has pulled down the curtains on this issue, stating that ‘everything’s alright’.
Although state Chief Election Commissioner Sanjeev Kumar had explained the vote counting process, the numbers that came out after the actual results on May 23 had left eyebrows raised.
To explain it better, in the Mandya Lok Sabha constituency where independent candidate Sumalatha Ambareesh and Congress-Janata Dal (S) candidate Nikhil Kumaraswamy had contested against each other, according to the ground reports around 3459 surplus votes were recorded than the actual numbers. Similarly, in Raichur Lok Sabha constituency 5721, Belagavi 4208, Dharwad 2242 and Shivamogga 2286 surplus votes were observed to be recorded.
Amid this, Sanjeev Kumar clarified that the election counting was fair and that there were no fraudulent cases.
He has said that although taking into consideration all the 28 LS seats in the state, a total of 22000 extra votes were registered.
“We have checked the EVM machines and tallied it with counted votes. We have not observed any differences. The election officers had presented the count of registered votes and later we had received the exact information on the voting pattern. That report has not shown any differences”, he said.
Explaining the process of cross checking the votes he said, “The reports submitted by the presiding officers and the data collected through Form no. 17 tally with each other and hence there are no differences in vote counts. This is credible information.”
It can be recalled that the State Social Welfare Minister Priyank Kharge too had raised doubts on Twitter on Saturday, June 1, tweeting that the general election results and the local body election results had differences, where the Bharatiya Janata Party had won massively in the general elections and had shown average performance in the local body elections. He had urged the Election Commission to look into the matter.
