New Delhi: The Election Commission of India (ECI) on Tuesday suspended four officers posted in West Bengal to share the login credentials of their Electric Roll (ER) database with “unauthorized persons”.Focusing on the grave intervals by the authorities, the pole body stated that the Chief Electoral Officer of Bengal informed the ECI about “wrong additions by four officers about the wrong addition of names in electoral rolls” wrong additions “in Baruipur Purba”.Four suspended officers were posted in the capacity of Election Registration Officer (ERO) and Assistant Election Registration Officer (ARO), who are responsible for the preparation, amendment and improvement of the electoral rolls.The Election Commission said that appropriate disciplinary proceedings would be initiated against Dibotam Dutta Chaudhary (ERO), Tathagata Modal (Aero), Bipalab Sarkar (ERO) and Sudeepta Das (Aero), saying that the FIR would be “potential amount for their actions, which will be recorded probably for criminal misdeeds”.Pol Body said that the FIR will also be lodged against contingent data entry operator Suker.A few days ago, ECI nodded FIRS against two electoral registration officers (EROs) in Bengal for discrepancies in the list of voters. The two officials shared their passwords with data entry operators, allowing the latter to feed the data of 102 fake voters to the EC portal. TOI reported that Nandkumar in East Midnapur and Eros of Rajrhat-Gopalpur in North 24 Parganas were questioned by EC and were under investigation to fail to give satisfactory answers to the Commission.The office of the Chief Electoral Officer sent a report to the EC, indicating that the names of non-existent voters were directly recorded by data entry operators using passwords of two Eros. Two Eros has admitted to sharing passwords. In this case, it was found that even booth level officials (BLOS) were not sent to verify the names. Sources said that the lack of physical verification can be inflated with fake voters. The district election officials were then asked to investigate the malpractice.
