CHENNAI: Expressing its satisfaction over the submissions of the Election Commission of India’s counsel that all staff on election duty were furnished with Form 12 and 12 (A) and hence the State Chief Electoral Officer (CEO) could not be held responsible for the fault on their part in re-submitting them or re-submitting with wrong details, a vacation bench of the Madras High Court has dismissed a PIL petition praying for a direction to the CEO to re-issue the forms.
When the PIL petition from K Santha Kumar, a BT Assistant in the Government Higher Secondary School in GKM Colony here came up for hearing before the bench of Justices C V Karthikeyan and Krishnan Ramasamy, the counsel for CEO told the judges that all persons involved in the election work, numbering 4.35 lakh, were given the Forms and nobody was left out.
The allegation that several thousands of employees had been deliberately denied their right to vote is not correct. Of the 4.35 lakh employees, who had been furnished with the Forms, nearly 4.10 lakh had re-submitted forms with proper entries. After scrutiny, it was found that the forms submitted by 12,915 employees did not match the details available in the database and hence, they were rejected by the election authorities.
Holding that the interference by this court at this stage was not warranted, the judges dismissed the petition.