NEW DELHI: The Election Commission of India (ECI) on Tuesday suspended four officials posted in West Bengal for allegedly sharing login credentials of their elector roll (ER) database with “unauthorised persons”.Taking note of the grave lapses committed by the officers, the poll body said that action came after Bengal’s chief electoral officer informed the ECI “about the wrongful addition of names in the electoral rolls by the four officers” in Baruipur Purba.The four officials suspended were posted in the capacity of the electoral registration officer (ERO) and assistant electoral registration officer (AERO), who are responsible for the preparation, revision and correction of the electoral rolls.The Election Commission said that suitable disciplinary proceedings will be initiated against Debottam Dutta Choudhury (ERO), Tathagata Mondal (AERO), Biplab Sarkar (ERO) and Sudipta Das (AERO), adding that FIRs will be lodged against them “for their actions, which potentially amount to criminal misconduct”.The poll body said that FIR will also be lodged against the casual data entry operator Surojit Halder.A few days ago, the ECI gave the nod to FIRs against two electoral registration officers (EROs) in Bengal for anomalies in the voters’ list. The two officers shared their passwords with data entry operators, which allowed the latter to feed 102 bogus voters’ data into the EC portal. TOI reported that the EROs of Nandakumar in East Midnapore and Rajarhat-Gopalpur in North 24 Parganas were questioned by EC and were under scrutiny for failing to give a satisfactory reply to the commission.The office of the chief electoral officer sent a report to the EC, indicating that names of non-existent voters were entered directly by data entry operators by using the passwords of the two EROs. The two EROs have admitted to sharing the passwords. In this case, it was found that even booth level officers (BLOs) were not sent to verify the names. The lack of physical verification allowed the electoral rolls to be inflated with bogus voters, sources said. The district electoral officers were then asked to probe the malpractices.
