Voter Icard stash found, BJP, Cong trade blame
PROBE ORDERED EC rushes official as Karnataka battle takes new twist days before polling BENGALURU/ NEW DELHI:
The Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) accused each other on Wednesday of trying to rig elections due this weekend in Karnataka after the Election Commission said it had found nearly 10,000 voter identity cards stashed in boxes in a Bengaluru flat.
In midnight press conference on Tuesday, the Karnataka chief electoral officer Sanjiv Kumar said the seizures from a flat in Rajarajeshwari Nagar constituency included 9,746 voter cards and roughly a hundred thousand “counterfoils” that resembled acknowledgement slips issued while adding names to the electoral roll.
Kumar said on Wednesday that a deputy election commissioner-rank official was being rushed from the national capital to Bengaluru for probe.
Maintaining that prima facie the I-cards looked genuine, he said only a thorough inquiry will bring out the truth.
The incident triggered immediate reactions from the BJP, which, like Congress, approached the poll panel in New Delhi on Wednesday.
The BJP sought voting in the constituency to be countermanded, a request that the election commission said will be decided upon once a report by a special observer it dispatched to the state is received.
Karnataka votes on May 12 and results are expected on May 15.
“An FIR is being registered… preliminary verification suggests the ID cards are genuine but the significance of the counterfoils can only be verified after investigation,” Kumar had said in a hurriedly convened press briefing around 11:45pm on Tuesday night.