Abuse of money power and abuse or misuse of media has come out as a major concern as Telengana is going to see the casting of votes on December 7.
Talking to the New Indian Express in New Delhi, chief election commissioner said, “Abuse of money and abuse or misuse of media are the key challenges particularly in Telangana. In the 2014 polls, over 154 crore was seized only in Andhra Predesh. This time also, all the political parties have expressed their worries and have told the Commission that these are their main concern.”
Rawat agreed that in every poll innovative tactics are used during campaigning. “Abuse of money will be rampant and therefore the Commission takes effective steps to control and regulate this. Similarly, Media ownership has gone into the hands of political parties through different means and they are regularly campaigning for the persons who are favoured by the owners. This will be checked,” he added.
On the controversies surrounding deletion of voters from the list, the CEC asserted that the Commission uses latest technology to purify the electoral rolls.
“Earlier, the electoral roll used to be only on paper and it was nearly impossible to find anomalies. Thereafter, the Election Commission took the initiative of its digitization. Many things have come out. A lot of voters were deleted on various accounts. We started many programmes and introduced software to ensure the ‘purification’ of electoral rolls. It is being done since 2015. In Telangana, many political parties submitted their lists, which we sent to officials for verification. Similarly, in Rajasthan, many civil societies had complained about rolls and we took steps accordingly. This way the electoral roll has become clean without any anomalies,” Rawat said.
The number of voters in Telangana have come down from 2.82 crore in 2014 to 2.73 crore as per the final rolls published this month. The net deletions were about 22 lakh as 12 lakh new voters were added.
The poll panel has said that the removal of names from the list is due to multiple entries of voters and migrated and dead voters.
Congress had approached the Supreme Court over deletion of large number of voters and the matter was subsequently referred to Hyderabad High Court.