Reported by Chinmaya Dehury

Bhubaneswar, June 4:

After being caught badly bungling polling figures and then making it worse by removing the damning pages from its official website (ceoorissa.nic.in) altogether, the office of the Chief Electoral Officer (CEO), Odisha has now come up with a curious explanation for the wide divergences in the number of votes shown as cast on its website (ceoorissa.nic.in) and the number of votes shown as polled on the Election Commission of India (ECI) website (eciresults.nic.in): ‘clerical error’

vote poll

“We admit that there are discrepancies between the number of votes shown as cast on the CEO website and the aggregated votes polled as shown on the Election Commission of India (ECI) site. However, this is a clerical error and we would correct it within four-five days,” said a senior official declining to be named.

He said the error occurred while the department collected initial round wise data from the district level during the counting.

However, the official failed to reply how the discrepancy occurred in all the 147 Assembly constituencies and to the extent of a whopping 16, 000+ in one Assembly constituency (Rajgangpur), enough to change the outcome of the election in most constituencies.

Interestingly, talking to OST last evening, joint CEO JP Das had said the missing pages could have been due to a ‘technical error’.