Day after Union minister seeks re-evaluation of votes, SP candidate blames EVMs

BAREILLY

: Following

Union minister

Santosh Gangwar’s letter to district magistrate for re-evaluation of the

votes

of booth number 290, where he could bag only 5 votes, his arch rival and Samajwadi Party candidate Bhagwat Saran

Gangwar

has raised questions over authenticity of EVMs.


The

SP

candidate, who lost to Gangwar in the 17th Lok Sabha polls, said, “Eight-term MP and Union minister Santosh Gangwar has accepted that

EVM

can be hacked. All opposition parties have been saying the same thing but neither the election commission of Indian, nor BJP were ready to accept this. We are happy that MP Gangwar has indirectly accepted that votes were manipulated.”

Notably, Union minister Santosh Gangwar stated in his letter to DM that he was surprised to note that he got just five votes in Hindu-dominated Vishnu Bal Sadan (booth number 290) while the SP candidate received 583 votes here. He also sought a re-evaluation.

Gangwar had won the Bareilly seat by a margin of 1,67,282 votes.

District magistrate VK Singh had told TOI, “The minister earlier raised the matter with me and thereafter we checked the records and found it was a clerical mistake. There was no difference in grand total and the margin of the votes. It is a minor issue. While preparing the data sheet a wrong entry would have been made by mistake. However, in actual vote count, there was no mistake. We will inform the minister about it.”

The SP candidate, however, said, “When the BJP has continuously been marking victory in elections after elections, what stops them from conducting polls by ballot papers? BJP and ECI should understand one thing that a big chunk of voters doesn’t believe in EVMs. And several developed countries have returned to conventional polling system of ballot box after finding that EVMs are not reliable.”

Bhagwat Saran Gangwar also provided a list of the countries, like Netherlands, Germany, Italy, England, Ireland, France and USA, which have abandoned polling through EVMs.

The SP leader said, “At least 300 EVMs were defunct as soon as the polling started on the polling day and on several booths polling could take place only after 10 am once the new EVMs could replace the defunct ones.”


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