AIADMK ally DMDK's General Secretary Premalatha Vijayakanth on Thursday, June 6, called for a recounting, under the supervision of a retired judge, in Tamil Nadu's Virudhunagar Lok Sabha constituency where her son and party candidate Vijaya Prabhakaran lost.
DMDK's Prabhakaran lost to his Congress rival and sitting MP, Manickam Tagore by a slender margin of 4,379 votes. While Tagore garnered 385,256 votes, Prabhakaran received 380,877 votes.
Addressing a press conference here, the DMDK leader alleged that her party candidate was made to lose the election deliberately and she had all the evidence to prove it.
"Vijaya Prabhakaran was defeated by a very close vote margin. Why did the District Collector stop the vote counting from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m.?" She claimed that there were many irregularities after the 13th round of vote counting was completed and that the official announcement and reports from the constituency were contradictory.
"Why were the postal ballot votes in Virudhunagar counted at midnight?" she asked, arguing that there had been a mistake in the vote counting. She also questioned why Chief Minister MK Stalin had announced victory in all 40 constituencies (39 of Tamil Nadu and one of Puducherry) before the results of Virudhunagar were announced.
Premalatha Vijayakanth said that it was the right of a political party to demand recounting within 45 days of results being declared and she expected that the Election Commission would take a proper decision in this matter.