Trinamul and BJP leaders in Jalpaiguri have in a rare consensus alleged that “negligence” of some polling personnel, especially presiding officers who conducted elections across various booths, prevented their parties from winning more seats in the district.

Leaders from both camps have cited huge cancellations of votes owing to the absence of the distinguishing mark — a round seal or stamp — and signature of the presiding officer in ballot papers.

Mahua Gope, the district Trinamul president, said they came to know that thousands of votes were cancelled as there was no distinguishing mark or presiding officer's signature in the ballots.

“This happened because of the negligence of some presiding officers. We suspect some did it by design. If ballots were not cancelled to such an extent, we would have won more seats in the two lower tiers,” Gope said.

This time, Trinamul secured all 24 seats of Jalpaiguri zilla parishad. The party also won in around 185 (of 238 seats) and has a majority in all seven panchayat samiti.

At the panchayat level, there are 1,701 seats in 80 panchayats. Trinamul won around 1,050 seats and gained majority in around 70 panchayats. The BJP got around 465 seats with a majority in eight panchayats.

In Jalpaiguri, there are 15.87 lakh voters in rural areas of the district. Among them, 13,01,871 voters had cast their votes.

On July 11, as the counting started, it was found that many ballots didn’t have the stamp and signature.

“We acted according to State Election Commission orders and all such ballots were deemed invalid,” said district magistrate Moumita Godara Basu.

On July 10, a day ahead of the counting, the poll panel had instructed that such ballots would not be counted.

Sources in the administration said they were yet to come up with final figures for the cancelled or invalid ballots, but a rough estimation shows around 70,000 ballots were cancelled in the zilla parishad tier and another 30,000 ballots in the two lower tiers.

“This means close to 8 per cent (7.68) of ballots were cancelled, almost double the usual rate of cancellation. The administration should find out why so many ballots were not stamped or signed,” said Bapi Goswami, the district BJP president.

A glimpse of results in all three tiers shows the same trend of cancellations. For example, in Salbari panchayat, 1,233 voters each voted in both seats 4 and 5. Of those, 433 and 434 ballots or almost one-third of total votes were cancelled.

In seat 5 of Bahadur, a panchayat in Sadar block, 389 of 1,049 ballots —around 37 per cent — were cancelled during counting. In Patkata, another panchayat in the same block, 549 ballots out of 1,110 ballots in seat 13 were found invalid. In one seat of Sikarpur panchayat under Rajganj block not a single ballot had the seal or the signature. All ballots were cancelled and results announced on the basis of 10 election duty votes.