Will respond to EC notice in time: SP

Lucknow, Oct 28 The Samajwadi Party (SP) said that it will respond in time to a notice served by the Election Commission, seeking proof of allegations of deletions in voters' lists in the Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections earlier this year.

The EC had served the notice to the SP on Thursday, asking the party to submit a documentary proof by November 10.

Noting that Akhilesh Yadav's statement made while addressing the media after his re-election as the SP president in September-end, "is extremely serious and has far reaching substantive and perception implications on the integrity of elections and thereby on democracy".

The party's national spokesperson Rajendra Chaudhary said: "We will prepare a detailed response to the EC notice and submit it before the November 10 deadline. The allegations were not based on hearsay but on specific inputs from the party leaders from across the state."

He questioned if the EC would declare 2022 poll results null and void once the charges are proved.

"Before and during the elections, we had submitted a number of memorandums and party delegations had met senior officials at the state elections office regarding complaints of irregularities, but not a single complaint was addressed," Chaudhary said.

Akhilesh Yadav, while addressing delegates at party's national convention on September 29, had said that names of 20,000 voters from the Yadav and Muslim communities were deleted from almost all 403 Assembly constituencies at the behest of the BJP.

Akhilesh and his party, however, did not make any formal complaint in this regard.

"We are being served a notice by the EC after the model code of conduct has ceased to exist. This is unprecedented. The EC should make another unprecedented move, it should announce that once the charges are proved, it would declare the poll results null and void," said the spokesman.

SP sources said the issue of party supporters' names being struck off from the voter lists had come to light in the run-up to the 2022 polls.

Allegations are that the party had come across instances where the voters list given to candidates were different from what the election officials had.

The issue was, however, dismissed claiming that the person distributing the list, handed over a bundle of uncorrected lists.