‘Nothing can go wrong’: Election chief responds to Rahul Gandhi’s criticism
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New Delhi: Chief Election Commissioner Rajiv Kumar on Wednesday said the poll body has a system in place involving lakhs of polling officials feeding data where nothing can go wrong.
Designed to highlight mistakes, the systems in place for managing electoral rolls, randomisation and deployment of EVM, voter turnout and results, according to him, would not go wrong.
Rajiv Kumar told an event for releasing the EC’s Lok Sabha 2024 Atlas that the EC’s databases were behind the publication including statistics of last year’s general elections.
‘What makes us sure that nothing can go wrong is that this data is fed by at least 10-10.5 lakh polling officials…There are so many people involved in this that as a design, nothing can go wrong,’ he was quoted as saying.
The CEC’s remarks came after the Congress questioned the Commission over increase in number of electors in Maharashtra between the 2024 Lok Sabha election and the Assembly election five months later.
While EC had only 586 staff, about 2 crore polling officials, security personnel, agents of political parties involved in the process of the Lok Sabha polls.
Of 97.98 crore registered electors, 64.64 crore voted (66.10 per cent turnout) at 10.5 lakh polling stations in the 2024 Lok Sabha held in over seven phases.
A total of 8,360 candidates contested in the 543 Lok Sabha seats with 800 being woman candidates, and 7,554 male candidates. There were six third gender candidates in the fray.