HYDERABAD: Women activists in Telangana have raised serious concerns regarding the recent publication of electoral rolls on August 21, asserting that the deletion of 20 lakh voters from the rolls infringes upon the fundamental voting rights guaranteed by the Constitution.
Social activists Jasveen Jairath, Lubna Sarwath, Sara Matthews, and POW Sandhya convened a press conference at Somajiguda Press Club on Friday, alleging widespread irregularities in the voter rolls. They claimed that the deletion of votes occurred without due process, and in some instances, multiple votes by the same individual reappeared despite the completion of the second summarised revision of the rolls.
Sara, a human rights activist, revealed that her vote was inexplicably deleted during the 2018 Assembly election, and she was unable to find her vote in the online portal of the Election Commission this time as well. She highlighted the cumbersome process of re-registering for a voter ID and questioned why it couldn’t be as straightforward as applying for a PAN card, where the applicant is required to surrender the previous voter ID before obtaining a new one.
Lubna detailed her battle against the discovery of 5,131 duplicate, triplicate, and quadruplicate votes during the GHMC elections in Ward no 72, Asifnagar division, which she had contested. She has taken the matter to court, seeking the cancellation of that election, with arguments scheduled for September 4.
Lubna questioned why a de-novo process similar to MLC elections couldn’t be implemented, involving the preparation of a new voter list and a comprehensive enumeration.
The activists expressed their dissatisfaction with the current process and urged the Election Commission to simplify both physical and online voter enrolment, making necessary amendments where required.
They warned that allowing such discrepancies to persist in a democracy poses a grave danger to society.