Taking note of a viral video purportedly showing an electronic voting machine laying unattended at the house of a BJP candidate, the Election Commission (EC) has ordered the removal of returning officer of Pali Assembly seat in Rajasthan
The EC ordered removal of Pali returning officer Mahaveer, who has been transferred, and Rakesh from Jodhpur has been asked to take the charge, the commission said. The EC said that a section officer carrying a reserve machine had gone to the BJP candidate's house following which the officer was removed and the EVM taken out of election system.
Adding to the headache of the EC a ballot unit ( BBAUD 41390) was found lying on the road in Rajasthan's Kishanganj constituency, hours after voting ended for the high-stake elections in the State. The incident prompted Election Commission to suspend two poll officials on grounds of negligence .
"During transportation it was fell down on the way, was reported to Returning Officer Kishanganj. He examined the matter and found guiltythe officials accompanying during transportation. Abdul Rasheeq and Patwari Naval Singh were suspended with immediate effect on Friday after the unit was near a highway found in constituency's Shahabad area in Baran district", an EC order said.
It is not just in Rajasthan, but in other state like Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh which also went to the polls the conduct of some election officials have caused the opposition crying foul play. A number of incidents, mostly related to Electronic Voting Machines took place this year in five assembly polls.
Earlier, in Chhattisgarh three men with laptops were detained by police from near a strong room in Bastar under suspicious circumstances.
The men had claimed that they were employees of Reliance Jio. The company, however, refuted the claims and said that the men were not employees of Reliance Jio, but technicians of a local vendor who had gone to the site to carry out regular maintenance work after an outage was reported with one of their mobile tower located at the Mahila Polytechnic College Jagdalpur.
In Madhya Pradesh, a set of voting machines reached the strong room in Sagar, 48 hours after voting ended. According to reports the EVMs were kept at a police station in Khurai city in the district, where state home minister Bhupendra Singh, the sitting MLA was seeking re-election. The EC in its report said that the EVMs in question were not used for voting, were kept on standby. In a similar incident, an EVM strong room in Bhopal suffered a blackout for nearly one and a half hours on Friday. It is also reported that the CCTV cameras at the strong room were switched off. Even in this case, the EC admitted that that CCTV cameras in the strong room did not work for over an hour but there was no discrepancy in EVMs found as it was reserved voting machines.