The Hindu : 'Poll panel not to interfere with exit polls'

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Sunday, Mar 16, 2003

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'Poll panel not to interfere with exit polls'

By Our Special Correspondent

Hyderabad March 15. The Election Commission will not interfere with exit polls unless Parliament makes legislation banning the exercise.

This was stated by T. S. Krishnamurthy, Election Commissioner, during an interaction with the press here on Saturday. He was addressing a training programme for election officers at the MCR HRD Institute.

He said the commission had gone to the court after making a study of the exit polls but withdrawn the petition later as there was lack of consensus between the Union Government and the commission. "Now, it will not interfere with the freedom'' regarding conduct of exit polls.

On "silence of law'' regarding the maximum number of counting of polled votes which could be allowed, he told Vani Prasad, Joint Collector, Hyderabad (Urban district), a participant, this problem was there earlier when votes were counted manually which gave scope for discrepancy. But now, counting was done by electronic voting machines. The percentage of complaints by candidates and others was "insignificant'' under EVMs.

On delimitation of constituencies, the Election Commissioner said there was scope for settlement of grievances through public hearing. But once the public hearing was over, the opinion of the delimitation authorities was "final''.

The courts would have no say in this matter. Public hearing was found to be "very useful'' in this respect. As far as Andhra Pradesh was concerned, draft proposals were yet to be published and public hearing conducted.

Mr. Krishnamurthy hailed the Supreme Court's judgment on the Representation of the People Act, saying the electors would be in a better position to choose their representative armed with full information about the candidate. The commission would certainly implement the directives given by the apex court. A major spin-off of this decision would be that there would be good candidates. There were many areas in the election process which required reforms.

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