BHUBANESWAR: The special intensive revision (SIR) of electoral roll by the Election Commission will kick off in Odisha from May 30, chief electoral officer (CEO) R S Gopalan announced here on Friday
The final electoral roll will be published on September 6. July 1 has been fixed as the qualifying date for the roll revision and as per the schedule announced by the EC, printing, preparation and training work will be carried out from May 20 to May 29, the CEO said.
Ahead of the SIR, forms for the exercise will be made available to voters both offline and online. Booth level officers (BLOs) will conduct house-to-house visits from May 30 to June 28 for distribution and collection of forms.
The task of reorganising polling stations will also be completed by June 28 and the draft electoral roll will be published on July 5.
Claims and objections can be filed between July 5 and August 4, while their disposal process will continue till September 2. A total 45,255 BLOs will visit voters’ homes during the exercise and each voter will receive two pre-printed copies of the enumeration form. One filled form will be collected by the BLO, while the second signed copy will be returned to the voter as an acknowledgement receipt.
Voters can also download the form from the Election Commission’s official portal voters.eci.gov.in and upload the filled form online, he said.
“If any voter faces difficulty in filling out the form, the BLO will provide complete assistance. Eligible persons wishing to register themselves as new electors will also be provided Form-6 along with a separate declaration form by the BLO during the same period,” he said.
As part of the pre-SIR exercise, 94.61 per cent of the state’s electors, totaling around 3.16 crore, have already been mapped with the electoral roll published during the last SIR in 2002. Over 9 lakh deletions were made on the basis of this mapping, he said.
The CEO also clarified that voters will not be required to submit any additional document during the enumeration process and the draft electoral roll will be prepared on the basis of the correctly filled forms received from electors.
He urged political parties to appoint booth level agents (BLAs) at every polling station to ensure transparency in the revision process. So far, the recognised political parties in the state have appointed 27,723 BLAs, Gopalan said.