Actor-turned-politician Hero Alam has applied for a recount in the recently held Bogura-4 by-election, which he lost by just 834 votes.
He submitted the application to the Bogura deputy commissioner's office around 1pm on Sunday.
In his application, the much-maligned artist alleged that the results from different centres were changed during the vote counting process, and that this becomes apparent from tallying the vote counts from each centre.
It's worth remembering that with the use of EVMs (as was the case in all centres of all six constituencies where the February 1 by-elections were held), votes are not counted as you would in an election using the ballot. Rather the electronically tallied totals from each centre are sent to a central desk where these centre-wise totals are all then tallied.
What Hero Alam is alleging, effectively, is that false totals were sent from some centres, or the numbers from some centres were falsified during the central tallying process.
"I have collected the results of all polling stations. Nearly every contender, including me, got unusual vote totals in some centres. I have submitted an application for a recount of the votes to the Deputy Commissioner and Returning Officer with reference to those polling centres," Hero Alam added.
For years, Alam has been cast as an agent provocateur in the cultural arena of the country through his various forays in film or music. Although his popularity in digital metrics cannot be denied (followers, social media reach), his work has almost never been taken seriously and he has struggled for acceptance among those regarded as the vanguards of Bengali culture and heritage.
In the Bogura-4 election, Hero Alam seemed to be able to fashion that outsider image into a viable platform for people to rally around- bringing him within a whisker of entering the nation's foremost arena - the hallowed turf of parliament.
No doubt his critics would see that as his ultimate act of provoking the nation's sensibilities.
Alam said his application was 'accepted' by the EC, although this may just have meant they received it for consideration. He is disappointed at not getting a date set for the vote recount. If the EC doesn't respond to his request, he has threatened to pursue the matter in the courts.
Were he to do that, his name may get associated with a larger issue than even he bargained for: the issue of whether votes can be recounted at all using the EC's current generation of EVMs, that has been hanging in the air and may need the stringent scrutiny of a court case to be settled one way or the other.
Last November, for the very first time, the EC was forced to do a recount of an election that used EVMs, as an electoral tribunal ordered the recount of a ward councillor election held in Dhaka North in 2020. It came out identical, and a number of experts including ex-election commissioners criticised the EC's claim that votes cast on the EVMs being used can be recounted.
They say without a paper trail to compare and audit the votes against, a machine would always return exactly the same result that it provided the first time.
The Bangladesh Election Commission rather famously rejected the Voter Verified Paper Audit Trail or VVPAT system used by the Election Commission of India, where a paper record of each vote is produced automatically at the polling centre, that voters can take home and retain for their records. Later those can be used to challenge vote counts.
They instead went for Voter Verified Digital Trail or VVDAT, which puts all the information in a memory card turned over to the EC.
Hero Alam, who contested the by-polls as an independent candidate, lost Bogura-4 bagging 19,571 votes to JSDcandidate AKM Rezaul Karim Tansen's 20,405 votes, on a dreadfully low turnout that failed to reach even 15%. He also ran in Bogura-6, where he declared pretty early on that everything had been set up for the government's favoured candidate to win.
Source: United News of Bangladesh