NEW DELHI: After meeting the Election Commission of India (ECI) officials on Wednesday the delegation of the Congress party said it has submitted the complaints of EVMs from seven Haryana assembly constituencies to the poll body.
Bhupinder Hooda, who was leading Congress’s Haryana poll campaign, said the Election Commission has assured them that it would look into all the complaints.
Hooda also said that the Haryana poll results were “surprising” as it was contradictory to the survey reports and experts and that trends reversed in BJP’s favour only when counting on EVMs started.
“These results of Haryana are surprising because everyone thought that Congress will form the government in Haryana. Be it IB, experts, survey reports, but what happened was that when the counting of postal ballots started, Congress was leading everywhere, but when the counting of EVMs started, Congress was lagging behind. We have received many complaints. The counting of votes was delayed in several places. The Election Commission has assured us that they are looking into all the complaints,” Hooda told news agency ANI after the meeting with ECI.
Congress leader Pawan Khera said that the Election Commission officials’ reaction was “as usual a good smile and a good cup of tea but we need more”.
“We met the Election Commission officials and presented the documents of seven Assembly constituencies…Their reaction as usual was a good smile and a good cup of tea but we need more. Complaints from 13 more assembly constituencies will be submitted to ECI. There were issues regarding the batteries of the machines by our candidates. We have asked for a reply from ECI after conducting the investigation,” Khera said.
Khera further said: “We told ECI about the 20 complaints of which seven are in written complaints from 7 constituencies. There were machines which were at 99% and other normal machines were at 60-70% on the day of counting. We demanded that those machines should be sealed and secured until the investigation is complete. We also told ECI that in the next 48 hours, we will also present the remaining complaints to them.”
Earlier in the day, the ECI wrote a strong-worded letter to Congress chief Mallikarjun Kharge on party’s allegations regarding the Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) in recently-concluded Haryana assembly elections and termed the “results unacceptable” remark of party leaders Pawan Khera and Jairam Ramesh “far from a legitimate part of free speech and expression”.