Supreme Court to hear on May 17 plea by ADR on release of voter turnout data

New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Monday agreed to consider on May 17 a plea seeking a direction to the Election Commission to immediately upload account of votes recorded of all polling stations after the close of polling of each phase in the ongoing 2024 Lok Sabha elections.

A bench of Justices Sanjiv Khanna and Dipankar Datta told advocate Prashant Bhushan, appearing for NGO Association for Democratic Reforms, that the matter would be considered on Friday.

Bhushan has mentioned the matter before the court seeking urgent hearing.

The plea sought a direction to the Election Commission to provide tabulated polling station-wise data in absolute figures of the number of votes polled as recorded, in Form 17C Part- I, after each phase of polling in the ongoing 2024 Lok Sabha elections and also a tabulation of constituency-wise figures of voter turnout in absolute numbers in the on-going 2024 Lok Sabha elections.

The plea also prayed for uploading on the EC website the scanned legible copies of Form 17C Part- II which contained the candidate-wise result of counting after the compilation of results of the 2024 Lok Sabha elections.

It contended without the absolute number of voter turnout data, the general public cannot compare the number of votes polled with the number of votes counted as announced in the results and thus, discrepancies, if any, in the two sets of data (number of votes polled at polling booths and number of votes counted by EVM) can only be assessed when absolute numbers, and not merely percentages, for each constituency are released by the EC.

The NGO contended unless the exact figures are brought in the public domain, percentage figures are meaningless for the voter.

It pointed out the data published in the press release by the EC on April 30, 2024 (Phase I voter turnout- 66.14 per cent and Phase II voter turnout - 66.71 per cent) when compared with the initial data of April 19, 2024 and April 26, 2024 respectively showed an increase of nearly 6 per cent in the Phase I data and increase of approximately 5.75 per cent in the Phase II data.

It pointed out that the All India Trinamool Congress wrote a letter on May 6, 2024 to the EC, calling upon it to publish the total number of electors in each Parliamentary Constituency, the total number of voters as noted in the register of voters and the number of voters as per EVM for all PCs that have already gone to polls in Phases I and II.

Similarly, Congress President Mallikarjun Kharge has also written to other political parties questioning the increase in voter turn-out percentage and non-disclosure of the number of votes polled in numbers.

On May 3, Sitaram Yechury, General Secretary of CPI(M) also wrote a letter to the EC raising concerns over delays and discrepancies in the release of voting figures.