Civic polls: BNP claims voters wrongly mapped across city wards
BENGALURU: The Bengaluru NavaNirmana Party (BNP) has alleged large-scale discrepancies in the electoral rolls prepared for the upcoming corporation elections, claiming that several voters have been mapped to wards where they do not reside.
The party said preliminary verification found residents from the same streets, layouts and apartment complexes spread across multiple polling booths, resulting in incorrect ward mapping.
BNP founder Srikanth Narasimhan said the party’s analysis of Ward No. 34 (Chikkathoguru) and Ward No. 33 (Naganathapura) found 47 voters wrongly mapped under Naganathapura and 105 voters incorrectly placed in Chikkathoguru. He added that since publicly available rolls do not contain complete address details, the actual number of misplaced voters could exceed 1,000 in each ward.
The party said the issue stems from the absence of proper “sectioning” in the preparation of the voter list. As per the Election Commission of India’s manual, sectioning requires residents from the same physical geography—such as a street or apartment complex—to be grouped within a single section of a polling booth.
BNP also claimed that supervisors and Booth Level Officers responsible for allocating voters are unable to perform their duties accurately because they do not have access to full address data, which is available only in the system’s backend.
Vishnu Reddy said the errors raise serious questions about the credibility of the electoral process, adding that if voters cannot determine which ward they belong to, it could undermine public trust.
BNP said it has submitted supporting data to the Election Commission and urged it to conduct a ward-wise sectioning exercise before the final publication of the electoral rolls to ensure voters are mapped correctly.