16 July,2009 09:06 AM IST | | Chandran Iyer and Surender Sharma
Top IT expert asks Election Commission to explain how they managed to postu00a0 election results on their website on May 6 nine days before the final votes were cast; EC says it was dummy data
A leading IT expert from the city and an expert in geopolitics have asked the Election Commission (EC) to explain how the Lok Sabha election results were posted on the EC website on May 6, nine days before the final votes were cast on May 15.u00a0
Dr Anupam Saraph, the chief information officer of Pune, appointed by the Pune Municipal Corporation and an advisor to the United Nations and Dr Madhav Nalapath, an expert on geopolitics, say they accidentally stumbled upon some Excel sheets on the EC website on the said date that detailed the poll results for every candidate in India.
This, when the EC was to begin official counting only on May 16. The information posted on the site changed when Saraph and Nalapath checked the website on May 7 and 11. "The EC's website posted data on numbers of votes polled foru00a0 47 of the 8,701 candidates, who were contesting the polls before the polling was concluded. This has raised some rather serious questions about the electoral system," said Saraph.
EC responds
Election Commissioner S Y Quraishi downplayed the issue when MiD DAY sought his views. "The data posted on the EC site on the said dates was dummy data. If it is subjected to thorough scrutiny, it would become clear that the actual polling patterns differed from what appeared on our website on the said dates. A committee comprising eminent technocrats is working on the issue," said Quraishi.u00a0u00a0u00a0u00a0
Saraph and Nalpath are not satisfied with Quraishi's explaination. "If the data in these files was dummy data, how does it match the winning trend in the 108 constituencies, and why was the data changed on May 6, 7, and 11?" asked Nalpath.
