Chief Electoral Officer (CEO) Gopal Krishna Dwivedi on Tuesday urged the political parties to extend their cooperation in conducting free and fair elections. They should follow the Model Code of Conduct. All expenses towards social media would have to be accounted for, he said at a press conference at the Secretariat.
Mr. Dwivedi said the Media Certification Monitoring Committee (MCMC) was closely monitoring the paid articles and advertisements released in print and electronic media. Facebook, YouTube and Twitter were also being monitored. So far, 89 notices, including 48 to the TDP, 30 to YSRCP and 11 to JSP, were issued, he said.
Mr. Dwivedi, however, said mere issuance of notices did not amount to violation of the code. The party concerned would submit its response and then a decision would be taken. Once the candidates for Assembly and Lok Sabha were finalised, the candidate-wise monitoring of social media posts would be taken up.
Penalty
A team of experts were web crawling to identify the violations.
Penalty and three-year jail term would be some of the punishments applicable to both employees on election duty and parties, he said.
The CEO said the Police, Excise, Income-Tax and Commercial Tax departments had filed violation cases and seized cash, gold, silver, ganja, dress material, cellphones, saris, liquor etc worth ₹27,08,29,631 since the schedule was announced. It included gold and diamonds worth ₹6 crore seized on Monday.
The IT department was investigating into cash to the tune of ₹33,39,000. The Excise department seized 2.08 lakh litres of liquor worth ₹7.35 crore, a good catch compared to the last elections.
Additional CEOs Sujatha Sarma and Vivek Yadav, I&PR Joint Director P. Kiran Kumar and others were present.
