HYDERABAD: Ahead of the elections, the GHMC and Election Commission had courted the youth of the State to volunteer for live web-casting and to assist Persons with Disabilities (PwD) on December 7, voting day. In the notices put up by these organisations, they had promised the volunteers that, despite being busy on voting day, they would still be able to exercise their franchise by availing the postal ballot service.
However, many of these volunteers claim that this promise was not kept. “I got interested when GHMC officials told us we would have postal ballots like any government employee on election duty. I would have otherwise had to travel from Hyderabad to Manthani. However, when, on voting day, I asked the concerned officer at my polling station, I never got a proper response. If my friends and I had known this, we would not have volunteered.
All five friends did not get to vote,” says Akudari Devaraj. Another volunteer, S Charana, an employee at a private firm says that polling booth officials did not bother to inform her about the procedure for using postal ballots. “We were asked to Assembly at our respective booths at 8 am on December 7, ready with laptops for web-casting. Later in the day, we asked polling booth officials about our postal ballots. But they told us the time for enrolment had passed,” she says.
Clarification
Meanwhile, GHMC Zonal Commissioner Hari Chandana told Express that they had sent messages to volunteers, asking them to enrol for postal ballots. “We had sent the volunteers messages but there was no response until it was too late,” she said.
GHMC Additional Commissioner Musharraf Faruqui said that some volunteers indeed might have been missed by officials. “We had trained them in two batches and we had collected their names to send them to their respective ROs for issuance of postal ballots. During this process, some of their names might have gone missing,” he said.