Telangana Congress is apprehensive of the enrolment of bogus voters using fake degree certificates for the upcoming Graduate MLC elections and urged election officials, on Wednesday, to put in place a strong mechanism to verify the certificates physically.
In a memorandum to the State Election Commissioner (SEC), chairman Marri Shashidhar Reddy and convenor G. Niranjan of the TPCC Election Commission Coordination Committee said that since voters were being asked to enrol online and upload their degree certificates, there was a greater chance of misuse and fake certificates used for enrolment.
They alleged that the ruling TRS was desperate to win the elections and going by the previous experiences, there was a greater chance of such fake voters emerging. They alleged that TRS has a ‘dubious distinction’ of tinkering with the purity of electoral rolls right from 2015 onwards.
The Congress had drawn the attention to large-scale illegal deletions in 2015 and for the first time in the history of India, there was a 14-member high-level committee of officials deputed by the Election Commission (EC) to visit Hyderabad and find the complaints to be ‘genuine’, they said in the letter also marked to Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) Sunil Arora.
The Congress reminded that their fear has some credence given the fact that since 2014 there were several instances of “fake degree certificate rackets” exposed by the police. As promised by the officials at the all-party meeting on October 3, they demanded a door-to-door verification by officials. At the same time the qualification of the verification staff should be checked as the government had earlier hired sweepers, sanitary inspectors, lift operators and in some cases, even auto drivers, for such a job, it charged.