After the third phase of the 2024 Lok Sabha elections concluded on Tuesday with a voter turnout of 64.58%, the Congress demanded that the ECI provide the final voter turnout data immediately. The Opposition has raised concerns about “discrepancies” between the final and provisional turnout estimates given by the Election Commission of India.
A day before Phase 3 polling, Congress President Mallikarjun Kharge wrote to the party’s I.N.D.I.A bloc of allies is asking them to band together to oppose “discrepancies” in the ECI’s voter participation data and “delays” in the release of final figures. He stated that this was critical to “protecting the culture of a vibrant democracy and the Constitution”.
Mamata Banerjee, the Trinamool Congress supremo and West Bengal Chief Minister, had also expressed concern about the increase in polling percentage. She even made severe charges concerning the security of electronic voting devices, claiming, “At night, these people go and break the lock and change the machine, and they are inserting the machine that voted for the BJP.”
Previously, Uddhav Thackeray’s Shiv Sena has questioned the ECI over the turnout estimates, alleging that the election board was attempting to provide backdoor assistance to someone.
Congress leader Jairam Ramesh stated just after the third phase ended on Tuesday that the ECI needed to provide the final polling data promptly, “unlike the first phase, which took 11 days and the second 4 days”. “The Election Commission of India is expected to release the final polling percentage data for the third phase without any delay… We expect it to be in the same format as it has been in previous years – with the number of votes and registered voters separately for each assembly constituency and Lok Sabha,” Jairam Ramesh wrote in a post to X.
