Following criticism of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar for allegedly not informing his two Election Commissioners about the processes of adding new voters and removing names, a new controversy has emerged regarding the Election Commission’s software, ECINet. Congress MP Shashi Tharoor has called for the cancellation of the software, raising concerns about its effectiveness and transparency in managing voter registrations.
Reason: the permission to do so was controlled from Delhi,” the Express reported. A beta version of the same was tested during Bihar polls last November. the portal is also used by election officials While the ECINet website and app is used for disseminating real-time updates on the poll results for the public. But the EROs could not reverse those decisions through the software (ECINet). “This is extremely serious and involves depriving Indian citizens of their constitutional rights, as well as withholding essential humanitarian benefits, from dialysis treatments to transplants. Political chicanery is bad enough, but inhumane conduct is unconscionable,” Tharoor posted on X. “@ECISVEEP owes an apology to the affected citizens and indeed to the nation. Resignation is a minimal demand; rescinding this disastrous software and undoing the harm it has caused is now indispensable,” he added.
Read: Huge Row After Report Flags 2 Election Commissioners Objected To Poll Panel Steps The poll body had launched the ECINet app in January this year. “Attached was a list of 97 voters whom Goa’s own Electoral Registration Officers (EROs) had heard, examined and found eligible under a process laid down by the Supreme Court.
The earlier decisions to strike them off “have to be reversed,” the email said. Taking note of the report, Tharoor called it “extremely serious”.
During the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls, which is publicised as a cleaning-up exercise of poll rolls, started by the Election Commission last year, electors submitted forms and documents through ECINet, which was then used by officials to process the same.
Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar What makes the case even more acute in Goa is that being off the electoral roll here costs more than a vote. Several state schemes in Goa use the electoral roll to establish eligibility. The Goa Mediclaim Scheme, which funds super-speciality treatment not available in government hospitals (dialysis, angioplasty, open-heart surgery, transplants, chemotherapy, cochlear implants) is open only to voters of the state, the report notes.
The Express report says that four days before Goa was due to publish its final electoral roll under the Special Intensive Revision, the state’s Chief Electoral Officer wrote to the poll body in Delhi, claiming this was his eighth time in seven days.
A report in The Indian Express on Thursday claimed that what “two Election Commissioners, Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi, primarily warned against – the centralisation of ECINet and cutting out state ground-level officials – has played out in Goa, and its trail is recorded”.
