BENGALURU: Once the ongoing Special Intensive Revision (SIR) is completed in the country, the Election Commission is planning to weed out duplicate entries. The existing system allows Chief Electoral Officers (CEOs) to prune the electoral rolls at the state level giving limited option to cross check for duplicate entries with regard to other states.
“Corrections based on data and photos will be done across India to further clean the electoral rolls,” an EC official said. “Earlier each state had its own Electoral Roll Management System (ERMS) and the focus was on inclusion of names, rather than cleaning the existing electoral rolls.
Also state’s ERMS did not share their data with others, unless specific information was sought for.
The states had complete control over it. But with ERONET, data is managed by the Election Commission of India nationally which will help in further tightening of the rolls,” the official said. Presently the CEOs are looking for data, photos and similar entries of the entire state and to some extent border areas, following which anomalies are flagged pertaining to duplications and shifted voters.
This has also helped in issuing notices to people under no-mapping and logical discrepancies categories. Using the same format, tracking of duplicate voters at the all India level will also be done, to further clean and tighten the electoral rolls, the officials added. Karnataka was the pioneer in introducing the ERMS application and the last state to shift to ERONET.