UoH student poll results withheld

ABVP protests over many votes being invalidated.
UoH student poll results withheld

With allegations of rigging raised by a student  organisation during the counting of ballots at the University of Hyderabad Students’ Union election, the results, which were supposed to be declared on Friday, have been held back.

As counting of ballots was going on amidst tight security by the Chandanagar police and the university guards, students  belonging to the Akhila Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) raised a protest against counting panel invalidating many votes.

The issue would be taken up at a grievance cell meeting scheduled for Saturday evening between the university authorities and the representatives of the respective student organisations.

Earlier, with just about 10 rounds remaining out of the total 66 rounds of counting of votes, ABVP members raised an objection over the increasing number of invalid votes for each post.

ABVP spokesperson Anjaneyulu, however, alleged that rules and regulations were not being followed during counting. “All counting agents accepted that there were about 500-700  invalid votes out of the total 3,313. All those invalid votes belong to us. We are anyways leading in all the posts except two but we demand recounting of votes to ensure that all the rules and regulations are followed,” he said. The SFI representatives called the allegations baseless. “The university administration is holding the elections with four faculty members as returning officers and also two non-teaching faculty. The students are in no way involved in  elections,” said Sham Bharadwaj, SFI president. “It was noticed that there were more invalid votes this year which is surprising but cannot be called as rigging. We are open to recounting of votes if that is necessary,” he added.

A similar allegation by ABVP in 2009 students union election had led to a massive protest. In the following re-elections,  ABVP won the entire panel of students union. However, ABVP has been sitting out of the union for the last two years and are considered strong to make a comeback this year following the split of SFI-ASA alliance.

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