Dravidian majors’ booth panels began work last year to rally voters for LS polls in TN
TIRUCHY: From names getting enrolled in the voters list to ensuring their party sympathisers and traditional voters reach the booth on the polling day, booth committee members of the Dravidian majors did it all in Tiruchy, as always. Despite five lakh voters not turning up to cast their votes in the constituency, the party workers of both DMK and AIADMK played an immense role in bringing voters to booths.
The overall polling in Tiruchy constituency slipped by 2% compared to the 2019 Lok Sabha election. But the blame is on migration of voters to other segments and extreme weather as parties have done their best to ensure voters' participation.
Grassroots level office-bearers of the parties started their work early this time, from July 2023. They checked the electoral roll by conducting special camps and went door-to-door to collect details of voters in their booths.
AIADMK's secretary of ward 40 in Thiruverumbur assembly segment, S Roshan, said, "We organised camps last December to add the left-out names in the voters list and also carried out correction of entries in the draft electoral roll released by the election commission."
He continued, "There are around 10 booths in my ward which were assigned to 10 booth committee members. All of them were given the task of canvassing a minimum of 100 voters. Through their efforts, we could add around 300 new voters in my ward, which could be an advantage for our party in this locality."
DMK's secretary of ward 27 in Tiruchy West assembly segment, Amjath, said, "We started the field work 10 months ago, soon after the party held a statewide booth committee meeting led by MK Stalin in July 2023 in Tiruchy. Usually, we oversee corrections, additions, and deletions in the electoral roll of our ward.
But this time, we went an extra mile by approaching every person in the voters list to identify their political leanings. Each person from our booth committee was asked to collect the details of the beneficiaries of various government schemes so that it would be easy for us while canvassing votes. We ensured that at least one member of every family was a beneficiary of any of the schemes." He added that it was not a huge task as the DMK government had implemented a range of schemes for the elderly, women, and children.
While the DMK booth committee members were busy identifying the beneficiaries of government schemes, the AIADMK cadre were taking in the left-out people to garner their support.
"We not only reached out to our traditional voters but also to all others with an aim to increase our vote base. We hope that this exercise would have translated into votes," said a DMK worker from Beema Nagar.
A district level leader of BJP in Tiruchy, Sivakumar, said, "We did not focus on collecting the list of our potential voters this time. Our party increased the number of grassroots-level workers and also appointed Sakthi Kendra leaders, who were given the task of setting up booth committees."