HYDERABAD: Chief Electoral Officer (CEO) Vikas Raj said that the Election Commission is doing everything in its power to curb malpractices and increase voting percentage in urban areas. Speaking to a TNIE team as part of the sixth edition of Hyderabad Dialogues, Vikas Raj spoke about a range of issues such as vote from home, sprucing up the voter list, monitoring the flow of cash using software, dealing with UPI payments, and using the cVigil app to register complaints about malpractices.
He said his team has identified 29 constituencies where the polling percentage was particularly low. “All of them are urban or semi-urban at least, and 24 are in Hyderabad and its surroundings,” he noted.
Noting that the ECI has already been using multimedia campaigns for voter awareness, the CEO said that his team would focus on specific houses this time. “We have already been reaching out to gated communities, multi-storeyed buildings, IT offices, etc. These are the places where voting percentages are low,” he explained.
Speaking about vote from home that will be available in Telangana for the first time for senior citizens above 80 and people with disability of 40% or more, he noted that around 9-10 lakh people would be eligible. “That’s a number we can easily handle as we have about 35,000 BLOs. The BLOs will be visiting them first to give these applications and again to collect them,” he stated.
Vikas Raj noted around 470 complaints have been made on the cVigil app about election malpractices till October 14, but only 25 were from Hyderabad. He assured anonymity and said that the ECI would only forward the complaint to the local squads, which would resolve it within 100 minutes. Pointed out that only the audio part of the app worked and that photo and video complaints didn’t seem to be functioning, the CEO assured that he would check the issue.
Asked about duplication and instances of more than 30 voters at one residence, Vikas Raj said that it was due to legacy issues. “A lot of data has been there for about 30 years and has not been digitised. Our endeavour this time was to go door-to-door and correct most of these things to the extent possible,” he explained.