CHENNAI: The Election Commission of India on Friday informed the Madras High Court that the special intensive revision (SIR) of electoral rolls will begin in a week’s time in Tamil Nadu.
The submission was made by advocate Niranjan Rajagopalan, representing the ECI, before the first bench of Chief Justice Manindra Mohan Shrivastava and Justice G Arul Murugan when a petition filed by former AIADMK MLA B Sathyanarayanan alleging deletion of AIADMK members from the rolls in T Nagar Assembly segment came up for hearing.
The counsel assured that the grievance of the petitioner would be addressed during the SIR drive. The bench adjourned the hearing by a week.
The petitioner stated that a door-to-door verification in 229 booths in T Nagar constituency revealed duplicate, double-entries, inclusion of non-resident voters and deceased voters in 100 booths. Blaming the booth-level officers of filing reports without conducting field verification, the former MLA said that the authorities concerned did not take adequate steps to purge the rolls of such anomalies despite handing them proof.
He alleged that the negligence on the part of the booth-level officers amounted to serious dereliction of duty, and not just inefficiency, which resulted in compromising the integrity of the final electoral rolls impacting the fairness of the Assembly polls.
Such negligent action of the ECI is contrary to the provisions of the Representation of the People’s Act, 1950, and against the right to vote which is guaranteed under Article 326 of the Constitution.
Sathyanarayanan stated that he had lost the 2021 polls by a narrow margin of 137 votes due to mass deletion of genuine voters from the rolls.