Issue Directions to ROs for Counting Postal Ballot First, INDIA Bloc Tells ECI

New Delhi: Ahead of counting of votes on June 4, a delegation of the Opposition INDIA bloc met the Election Commission of India on Sunday, demanding that postal ballots be counted first to ensure transparency in the counting process.

Addressing the media after the meeting, Congress leader Abhishek Manu Singhvi, said: "This is the third multi-party delegation that went to the Election Commission during this entire election process. We came here with many issues, the most important of them was the postal ballot counting and declaring its result first".

He said that "the statutory rule of the Election Commission clearly says that postal ballots should be dealt with first, and their results will be declared ahead of EVM results. The Election Commission has repealed this practice, and this is a very grave and clear violation of the statutory rule. It is therefore vital that the spirit that underlies Rule 54 (a), which cannot be amended or repealed, must be followed.”

The memo pointed out that as per the “Conduct of Election Rules, 1961, the counting of postal ballots must be dealt/counted first after which the Returning Officer has to declare all the valid votes cast vide the postal ballots, record the results and declare the same”.

Citing the relevant sections of the Election Commission’s own laid down rules, the INDIA bloc memo pointed out how “a significant impact of the postal ballot votes was witnessed during the 2020 Bihar elections, when the difference between the winning alliance and the other parties was only 12,700 votes for the entire state, whereas the total number of voters that had opted for postal ballots in the state of Bihar were 52,000”.

The memo pointed out that these 12,700 votes accounted for only 0.30% of the total votes cast “but clearly changed the outcome of the entire election.”

Reminding the ECI that it was “duty bound to ensure the purity and the sanctity of the electoral process remains intact”, the opposition memo urged it to issue “urgent directions” in consonance with its own rules.

The memo also urged the ECI to “withdraw its letter no 470/2019/SDR (dt.18.05.2019) with directions to Returning Officers to complete the counting of postal ballots and declare the results on the Returning Officer’s table, before the final counting of EVMs.”