Following the assertion by RJD leader Tejashwi Yadav on Thursday about the rejected ballots marking the difference between his victory and defeat in the Bihar elections, a report indicates that according to Election Commission records, only in the Hilsa assembly constituency the margin of victory was less than the number of invalid mail ballots.
The Electoral Director (CEO) of Bihar told The Indian express that after a request from the Rashtriya leader Janata Dal, all the postal ballots in this seat, including those rejected, were counted and found to be in order.
JD (U) won Hilsa’s seat against RJD’s Atri Muni by a narrow margin of 12 votes. Of the total 551 votes by mail received for the seat, 182 were declared invalid.
Bihar Chief Executive HR Srinivas said the final candidate demanded a recount of EVM votes, as well as postal ballots, and that the Return Officer (RO) rejected the first request because his counting agents were present in the time of EVM results and satisfied with the procedure. “To satisfy the candidate, the RO allowed the recount of 551 votes by mail, including invalid ones. The result was unchanged,” he said.
Yadav had said on Thursday: “How can you turn your victory into 15 more seats than us? We believe that if the vote count had been fair, we would have come back with a tally of more than 130 seats. In so many electoral districts, the Postal ballots were counted at the end and not at the beginning of the count, which is the norm. Furthermore, there were seats where up to 900 postal ballots were invalidated. “
The RJD leader said the party suspected this was done to compensate for the support they had received from a large number of military personnel who were moved by their commitment to a rank, a pension plan. “We demand the counting of the postal ballots in all those districts and the process be recorded on video,” Yadav had said.
Of the total of 243 seats, only 11 (Hilsa, Barbigha, Ramgarh, Matihani, Bhorey, Dehri, Bachhwara, Chakai, Kurhani, Bakhri and Parbatta) obtained a profit margin of less than 1,000 votes, according to data shared by the CEO of Bihar. . Of these seats, the JD (U) won four, the RJD won three, and the BJP, CPI, LJP, and an Independent candidate each won. RJD lost in just two seats determined by less than 1,000 votes, according to the report.
With the exception of Hilsa, the margin of victory was less than that of rejected mail-in votes in the other 10 seats. Although the candidates for the seats of Ramgarh, Matihani, Bhorey, Dehri and Parbatta also requested a recount, the RO rejected their request because the margin of victory was greater than the rejected mail-in votes. In each case, the RO gave a reasoned order, the CEO said.
Responding to Yadav’s allegation of a delay in delivering certificates to the winning candidates, Srinivas said that at the end of the EVM count, five polling stations were randomly chosen and their VVPAT vouchers verified against the EVM count. “Counting VVPAT ballots takes time and is a tedious activity. Apart from that, in some situations, VVPAT ballots had to be counted when the Control Unit did not show the result and the voting officer did not remove the mock votes.” said. .
The CEO of Bihar explained that although the EVM rounds have ended according to the candidate, the announcement of the final result does not occur until the VVPAT ballots are counted and the data for all polling stations is entered into the CE software. “These reasons contribute to the time it takes to deliver,” he added.
At a press conference on Thursday, Srivastava said the body conformed to all prescribed standards. “The elections were free, fair, transparent and we recorded the counting procedure on video,” he said.
On Thursday, the Chief Elections Commissioner (CEC) Sunil Arora also denied the allegations. He said that Bihar’s electoral director has already responded to everything. The EC held four press conferences on November 10 to respond to various aspects of the process, Arora said.
“We do not respond to comments made by political entities. It is their decision, what they said, why they said. The final decision is up to the people,” he told reporters here. Responding to a query about the “slowness of the count”, Arora said taking into account the distancing rules in force due to the COVID-19
pandemic, the number of voters per polling place was limited to 1,000 instead of the usual 1,500. This had resulted in an increase of 33,000 polling stations. This time, Bihar had more than a lakh of polling stations. More polling stations meant the use of 63% more electronic voting machines (EVM).
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