CEC Gyanesh Kumar asks poll officials to hold all party meetings, resolve issues

Chief election commissioner (CEC) Gyanesh Kumar on Tuesday asked state chief electoral officers (CEOs) to hold all party meetings and resolve issues within the statutory framework, emphasising no electoral staff or officer should be intimidated using false claims.

“...fulfil all statutory obligations diligently and as per the existing legal framework...,” he said, referring to Representation of the People Act, Registration of Elector Rules, Conduct of Election Rules 1961, and Election Commission of India (ECI)’s instructions. He called for issuing action taken reports by March 31.

Kumar was speaking on the first day of a conference of the CEOs, district election officers, and electoral roll officers, days after West Bengal’s ruling Trinamool Congress (TMC) accused the ECI of “planting fake voters” for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

In a post on X, the TMC said it gave ECI 24 hours to come clean about the fake voters but it stayed silent. The TMC said it was exposing ECI using the rulebook. It referred to allegedly duplicated electors’ photo identification card (EPIC) numbers and said they have to be unique while vowing to fight electoral malpractices tooth and nail.

The ECI on Sunday said even though there are identical EPIC numbers, the addresses and the assembly constituencies for polling remain different. It added the duplication in EPIC numbers does not “imply duplicate/fake voters” as it was merely caused by the use of “decentralised and manual mechanism” with “identical alphanumeric series” by two different states and Union territories.