Election Commission (EC) is busy creating awareness about the revision of electoral rolls in all 28 Assembly constituencies.
However, activists who are working on revision of the electoral rolls, claimed that just creating awareness would not help in making the voters list accurate.
The lack of permanent staff, who handle voter revisions and lack of appropriate technology, would hit the Election Commission hard this year, they said.
While the Commission has put up the currently available list at all ward offices and has started accepting online complaints, the number of applications also are increasing. But with the lack of year-round-updating in the list, this year almost 20 per cent voters will be left out of the list, activists claimed.
“An Assembly constituency has 2 lakh voters on an average. Every year, approximately 10 per cent (20,000) people need to be added to the list in an area and the same number of names have to be deleted. The EC takes up the task every year during November-December. But the volume of updating that needs to be done is huge, so they cannot achieve complete accuracy in such a short time,” said Ramesh Ramanathan, Co-Founder, Janaagraha (NGO that devised the Proper Urban Electoral (PURE) Rolls system for the EC in one constituency).
The lack of a permanent and dedicated staff to handle all the updating has affected the work process.
“The EC uses the services of school teachers, revenue and health inspectors to carry on this process. Every month, there are thousands of changes in an area and handling all of these updates in 30 days is not a task that can be achieved efficiently with temporary staff,” said Basava Seshadri, an activist working in South Bangalore constituencies.
“About 50 per cent booths do not have booth level officer. Once-a-year updating of voters list is apt for rural India where the changes are only about 1 per cent,” he added.
Explaining that there will not be many discrepancies this year, Chief Electoral Officer (CEO) C S Suranjana said, “We have put out the draft list of voters in all BBMP offices, Deputy Commissioners, Assistant Commissioner of the revenue sub-divisions, tahsildar offices and at polling stations. This draft will be updated till December 5 and then the final list of voters will be published on January 16,” he said.
Arguing that while new voters can be added and residential address can be changed, there is very little being done about restoring incorrectly deleted voters from the list.
“In the rolls published on July 20, the names of one million voters from Bangalore district were deleted. The rolls published between October 30 and November 4 deleted another 3.5 lakh voters’ names. The CEO and his organisation are doing very little about restoring the deleted names. Positive actions are possible only if there is a sense of ownership, accountability and pride in the organisation maintaining the electoral rolls,” former naval officer P G Bhat (in his blog http://pgbhat.wordpress.com), who has been studying the processes of the Commission since 2008, said.
The EC is now actively focusing on revising the electoral list first and then dealing with the criticisms coming its way.