The Election Commission has described the reports about ghost voters in the Lok Sabha polls as incorrect saying the claims were based on provisional turnout data uploaded on its website.
In a statement the poll body said, the provisional voter turnout data reported on the Commission's website is only the tentative number of voters and not the final numbers.
The clarification was in response to allegations that there was a discrepancy in the total turnout and the actual number of electors in some states during the 2019 Lok Sabha elections.
The poll body said, two categories of votes are counted to arrive at the final result, those polled in Electronic Voting Machines and those that are collected through postal ballots from service voters and also from the personnel deployed for poll duties outside their constituencies.
The commission said, in earlier elections, it used to take months to collect such authenticated election data from all the returning officers.
In the last general election, it took between 2 to 3 months after the declaration of results to collect and collate such data in an authenticated form.
It said, due to the innovative IT initiatives taken by the Commission this time, the reconciliation of voters’ data for all parliament constituency has been completed in all states and expected to reach Election Commission from returning officers shortly.