Tamil Nadu Minister P Thiaga Rajan on Saturday urged the Bench of the Supreme Court hearing the Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR) application on immediate upload of voter turnout after each phase of Lok Sabha elections, to ensure accountability and transparency in the election process.

The Minister’s request came a day after the Bench of the Apex court while hearing the application of the ADR, gave a week’s time to the Election Commission of India (ECI) to file its response over the matter.

In a post on X, Rajan said, “The Form 17 data is being tabulated by every returning officer (543 Collectors/DMs) with the support of 1,000’s of staff (who the court can summon to testify if needed). As ECI already has the data, Why not publish it ? They used to earlier..Who benefits from hiding it now ?”.

The Minister along with the post also shared a media report- “Why can’t Form 17 C (records the numbers of votes polled at a booth) data be disclosed ? SC seeks ECI response on plea to publish voter turnout numbers soon”.

“To the Bench of the Supreme Court of India hearing the ADR case: Most candidates (especially smaller or non-tech-savvy parties and independents) will simply not have the capacity to collect, collate, tabulate, and re-sort (by counting table) the Form 17 data – EVM serial , total votes polled – from 1,500 to 2,000 booths per MP Constituency, ahead of the vote counting process,” he said.

The Minister said, “Therefore, the entire counting process is immensely more robust and transparent if the Form 17 data with these details is published as soon as possible after polling, and well ahead of the counting, so that every agent of every candidate in the counting centers knows exactly how many votes to expect be counted on each EVM, after the serial number of the machine has been matched with the booth. This will be especially helpful for candidates from smaller parties, and independent candidates.”

Claiming that publishing this data (by booth) was the norm of the ECI till 2019 or so, Rajan said, “When they mysteriously stopped publishing this data, and took all old Form 17 data off their website ? Within the ambit of a constitutional democracy, what possible motivation or justification can there be for this action ? How is the electoral process, and our democracy, even .0001 per cent worse off if this data.”

“Anyone with basic interest in democracy, and integrity, must insist on the data being published well before counting. Anyone arguing against publishing it, patently has malintent. There can be no other justification. Please do your Constitutional duty to preserve some vestiges of accountability, robustness, and transparency in the Election process.”

It may be mentioned that earlier this month, Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge wrote a letter to leaders of the INDIA bloc and alleged discrepancies in the voting data released by ECI for the first and second phase of Lok Sabha polls.

The poll panel had rejected his allegation and advised him to exercise caution and refrain from making any such statements.