An assistant returning officer was suspended and an FIR registered against him after VVPAT slips were found on the roadside in Bihar’s Samastipur district, the Election Commission said on Saturday.
Chief election commissioner Gyanesh Kumar said the VVPAT slips were of a mock poll and asserted that the “integrity of the polling process remains uncompromised”.
Mock polls are conducted in all constituencies to check the functioning of electronic voting machines and VVPATs and data from these trials are deleted before the actual voting commences.
The VVPAT slips were found scattered in a garbage heap in the Sarairanjan Assembly segment, which voted in the first phase of the Bihar polls on November 6.
Poll and police officials seized the slips in the presence of the candidates from various parties, Samastipur district magistrate said in a post on X.