DHARMAPURI: Dharmapuri Lok Sabha constituency has once again topped the polling percentage in Tamil Nadu with a robust 81.20% voter turnout on Friday.
However, in line with the statewide trend, the district witnessed a 1.13% dip in polling compared to 2019 when it polled 82.33%. This predominantly rural district, where the average literacy rate stood at 68.54% in 2011, has been maintaining a consistent record of registering higher polling compared to other parts of the state.
While parties attribute it to better political consciousness and the district administration gives the credit to its voter awareness drives, the dynamism of politics at the grassroots level where people feel it as a part and parcel of their lives, plays a huge role in determining voter participation in this relatively backward district.
Unsure why projection was done, says election official
It can be noted that while these variations were noted in the data released by the office of CEO, the periodic data released throughout Friday by Returning Officers of constituencies in their respective districts ended up being closer to the figures released at 12am since their data was based on figures aggregated from all polling stations and not just samples.
Sources said that CEO’s office was releasing figures based on data reported to them directly by the Presiding Officers (POs) of a sample of around 13,000 polling stations from the total of 68,321 polling stations across the state.
This reporting mechanism was working parallelly with the standard reporting mechanism of POs of each polling station reporting hourly data based on the register of voters (Form 17A) to their zonal officers, who in turn report to assistant returning officers (AROs). The AROs report the numbers to ROs, who feed them to the Encore portal.
While district officials acknowledged that there is room for variations in the system as these numbers are orally relayed, the margin of error could not have been as high as on Friday due to sample-based projections.
“I was alerted by political parties at 5.30pm that there were two sets of data (CEO and ROs) that were being released and both were at odds with each other. By 7pm, we had started to receive calls from reporters and others asking us how we managed to sharply increase the turnout. We knew that there had been a mistake,” said an election official.
“When a sample projection is made, there could be a huge difference in the actual turnout of voters because different polling stations in the same constituency don’t always register similar numbers,” said another official. For instance, in Chennai North seat, Jutkapuram (Periamet) recorded nearly 71% turnout while Elephant Gate had merely around 40%.
“When an extrapolation is done, these factors should all be taken into account. However, there was no need for an extrapolation since returning officers were promptly recording the data in the Encore portal. We are not certain as to why the projection was done when we have the infrastructure for compiling the actual numbers,” said another election official.
When contacted, the CEO acknowledged that a sample projection was done but did not divulge more information on why it was done or the number and criteria of the polling stations that were chosen as samples.
(With inputs by T Muruganandham @ Chennai)