Busy day for booth agents in Tamil Nadu, must ensure vote for respective parties
COIMBATORE: The success of the nearly month-long campaigning hinges on the work of booth agents today. All parties have been busy preparing their booth agents even as leaders crisscrossed across every nook and cranny garnering support.
As representative of parties, booth agents have to get inside the polling booth as early as 5.30 am and stay there till the last vote is cast.
All parties should have at least 10 agents in each booth (two inside and others outside). Two agents will be posted inside a booth for a candidate. One of them will be the main agent and the other will be reliever.
Explaining their role, Tamilmarai, a DMK functionary who will be coordinating with booth agents, said. “Booth agents need to aware of the number of voters for a booth. They must keep track of how many of them have voted, and how many are absent or out of town or yet to vote. Also, they must be aware beforehand of which party an individual in the locality is likely to vote for. Booth agents will inform the status of polling and voters to party functionaries at regular intervals. Based on their information, party workers make sure everyone in a locality casts their vote. Agents must ensure no vote goes waste for any reason.”
He said that major parties in Tamil Nadu usually do not hire and train booth agents. The area-level workers will be the booth agents. Their experience cannot be replaced by newly trained people.
“After entering the polling station at 5.30 am, they will be given ID cards. The party would get a voter’s list and stationeries to mark the voter’s presence or absence. After the poll, they must be there in the booth to get form 17c (account of the vote recorded), in which they detail the total votes and polled votes. The agents will get it and hand over it to area in-charges.
Form 17c collected from all booths will be compiled at constituency headquarters where they can cross-check the poll percentage,” Tamilmarai added.
N Angannan, who has been working as a main agent for AIADMK in Pollachi, said while candidates are prominent till then, booth agents will be prominent on the polling day. “Functionaries who are well-known to people in their respective areas will be appointed as booth agents. They are likely to be a full-time worker as they continue election work before the election and get a short break only after polling. Again their role becomes important during the counting of votes.”
But the situation of independent candidates is different and they are struggling to manage manpower at all the booths across the constituency. V Arunkanth, an independent candidate in Coimbatore, said, “There are 2,059 booths in Coimbatore constituency alone. But we have only around 40 volunteers. At other places, we are looking for volunteers. We should have at least one person to check the button allotted to us and it is a big deal,” he said.