Panchkula: The Congress on Wednesday accused the BJP govt of attempting to “manipulate the electoral process” in the upcoming Panchkula municipal corporation elections, alleging large-scale irregularities in the voter list.Addressing a press conference at the party’s state headquarters in Chandigarh, Haryana Congress chief Rao Narender Singh and Rajya Sabha MP Randeep Singh Surjewala claimed that thousands of duplicate entries had been detected in the Panchkula voter rolls.Surjewala alleged that an analysis of the electoral data revealed 8,543 voters whose names appeared more than once, translating into over 17,000 duplicate entries. He termed the issue a “direct attack on democracy” and questioned the integrity of the electoral process. He said the findings were based on cross-verification of voter lists across all 20 wards of the municipal corporation, which had around 2.8 lakh voters. The Congress leaders submitted a memorandum along with the alleged list of duplicate entries to the state election commission and the returning officer. The party demanded immediate revision and purification of the voter list, identification and removal of duplicate entries, publication of corrected ward-wise voter lists in the public domain, and a probe into the alleged irregularities.
