Hyderabad: The Election Commission is considering holding the Telangana state Assembly elections between November 21 and 26, with November 24 being the likely date.
In the wake of large-scale complaints by political parties about irregularities in the voter lists, the Election Commission of India is expected to send audit teams to conduct a regulatory audit of electoral rolls, as well as polling stations and storage of electronic voting machines and Voter-Verified Paper Audit trails.
The audit teams will begin to audit the electoral rolls after October 8, after the release of final voter list.
The TRS leadership has communicated to its candidates that elections will be held on November 24 and asked them to plan their campaigns accordingly.
The party is absurdly thrilled that the polling date matches with party chief K. Chandrasekhar Rao’s lucky number, 6 (November 24: 2+4=6). Mr Rao, a staunch believer in numerology and Vaastu, dissolved the Assembly on Septe-mber 6, his lucky number.
The Election Commiss-ion of India will conduct a regulatory audit of poll-related activities in Madhya Pradesh, Chhatti-sgarh, Rajasthan and Mizoram, which go for Assembly elections this year-end. As part of this, the ECI will audit voters’ education and electoral participation or SVEEP (Systematic Voters’ Education and Electoral Participation) activities, and training of booth-level officers. The audit teams are scheduled to visit Telangana soon.
The mandate of these audit teams is to detect specific instances of non-adherence of ECI guidelines and legal provisions and follow it up by remedial action.
The Congress has voiced its suspicion about 70 lakh deleted and duplicate voters in the state and has filed a case in the Supreme Court on the issue.
