Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) National Convener, Arvind Kejriwal, along with Raghav Chadha and three other party leaders, met Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) Gyanesh Kumar on Thursday as part of the poll panel’s ongoing efforts to address concerns related to electoral rolls, voter ID-cards and EVMs.
The meeting, a part of interactions being held by the Election Commission of India (ECI) with the presidents of various national and state political parties, also sought to address former Delhi CM Kejriwal’s claims about alleged manipulation of EVMs, which he stated had increased the BJP’s votes by 10 per cent.
Just before the Assembly elections in Delhi in February, Kejriwal had alleged that voters had told him that they press the AAP symbol on the EVM but the vote goes somewhere else. “I urge voters to resort to heavy voting so that our votes increase by 15 per cent so that we can overcome the 10 per cent setback due to EVM manipulation,” Kejriwal had said in a video issued just two days before polling in Delhi.
At the meeting on Thursday, the CEC and Election Commissioners Dr. Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Dr. Vivek Joshi interacted with Kejriwal and other AAP leaders, including Saurabh Bharadwaj, Pankaj Gupta and N.D. Gupta.
“These interactions provide for a long-felt need for constructive discussions which enable national and state party presidents to share their suggestions and concerns directly with the Commission,” said an official EC source.
This initiative aligns with the Commission's broader vision of further strengthening the electoral process in accordance with the existing legal framework through discussions with all stakeholders, he said.
The Commission had earlier met delegations of the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) led by former Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Mayawati on May 6. On May 8, the EC met a BJP team led by party President Jagat Prakash Nadda.
The EC met representatives of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) on May 10 and National People's Party on May 13. In addition to these high-level engagements, the Commission has conducted a total of 4,719 all-party meetings at various levels across the country.
These include 40 meetings convened by Chief Electoral Officers (CEOs), 800 by District Electoral Officers (DEOs), and 3,879 by Electoral Registration Officers (EROs), cumulatively involving over 28,000 representatives from different political parties.
The ECI's outreach underlines its commitment to inclusive electoral governance and to continuously evolving the electoral ecosystem through dialogue, transparency, and cooperation.