HYDERABAD: With the Jubilee Hills Assembly seat falling vacant following the death of MLA Maganti Gopinath, Chief Electoral Officer C Sudarshan Reddy announced on Tuesday that the Assembly Legislative Secretary has formally notified the vacancy via a gazette. The CEO’s office has forwarded the notification to the Election Commission of India (ECI), and the byelection is expected by December.
Addressing a press conference, Sudarshan said the ECI has introduced several reforms to enhance transparency, voter convenience and electoral efficiency. These include reducing the maximum number of voters per polling station from 1,500 to 1,200 and locating polling stations within two kilometres of voters’ residences. Mobile phone deposit facilities will also be provided outside polling stations.
The ECI has rolled out 21 new initiatives. These include reducing the campaign booth distance from polling stations to 100 metres, launching ECINET (a unified digital platform integrating over 40 ECI apps), linking with the Registrar General’s death records to remove deceased voters and resolving duplicate EPICs to ensure unique voter IDs.
The ECI has held 4,700 meetings with over 28,000 political party representatives and conducted national-level consultations for feedback. Over 3,500 Booth Level Officers (BLOs) have been trained, with plans to train 1 lakh more. Booth Level Agents (BLAs) of political parties are also being trained for collaborative election work.
A mobile app for BLOs has been developed to streamline duties and improve voter services. Special outreach is underway to increase participation from urban, young and marginalised voters. Regular review meetings and inter-state coordination are also being conducted.
Regarding the EPIC clean-up, Sudarshan stated that of the 59,390 duplicate EPICs, 29,153 have been deleted and 30,237 retained. In 39,248 cases where the same EPIC was issued to different individuals, new numbers have been allotted and delivered. As of June 16, Telangana has 3,36,55,554 voters.