Days after being pulled up by the Delhi High Court for “bogus voters” on the final electoral rolls, the Election Commission, in an affidavit, alleged that the data submitted by the petitioner was “incorrect” as it was drawn from the draft electoral rolls. A writ petition filed by former Congress MLA candidate Naresh Kumar had alleged that there were over 41,000 “bogus voters” in his constituency, Mundka. The EC, in an affidavit, had also admitted that over 2 lakh “bogus” or incorrect entries had been found in the draft electoral rolls published in October. Last week, the Delhi High Court had asked the EC to explain methods to issue the election photo ID cards (EPIC) and had raised the issue of incorrect and bogus voter cards. In the affidavit filed on Monday, the EC said the duplicate entries, multiple entries with the same photo and other errors pointed out in the draft rolls had been deleted and the right to vote was only for the people whose names were on the rolls. “In case of any discrepancy/missing photo from the electoral roll, the elector has to produce a valid alternate photo identity document to establish his identity to vote,” the EC affidavit said. “As such, in view of the fact that the duplicate images have already been deleted and the roll purified, there is no possibility of misuse of EPIC issued earlier,” the affidavit stated. The poll panel, however, admitted that “EPIC are automatically generated for all registered electors upon enrollment”. This, it said, implied that there may well be several voter ID cards with the incorrect name, photograph or address on them. The hearing was adjourned to March 3, as the court did not have adequate time to hear the matter in detail. Justice Vibhu Bakhru also noted that there was “no hurry” to hear the case since the EC was already looking into the issue of eliminating fake voters.
