SPECIAL INTENSIVE REVISION | CEO asks DEOs to skip hearings for ‘unmapped’ voters linked to 2002 rolls

KOLKATA: On the day the hearing process began in Bengal, the state Chief Electoral Officer (CEO) issued a directive to District Electoral Officers (DEOs) clarifying that electors marked as “unmapped” due to technical issues in the Booth Level Officer (BLO) application may not be required to appear for hearings. These electors, despite showing self or progeny linkages in authenticated hard copies of the 2002 electoral roll, were flagged incorrectly because of problems in uploading legacy voter data. An official communication from the CEO’s office explained that incomplete conversion of the 2002 electoral roll from PDF to CSV format prevented the BLO application from fetching linkages for a large number of voters. As a result, many names, or those of their parents, were wrongly marked as “unmapped” even though they were present in the official 2002 rolls. To resolve the mismatch, the state approached the Election Commission of India (ECI) seeking permission for BLOs, Electoral Registration Officers (EROs) and Assistant EROs (AEROs) to upload relevant portions of the 2002 roll. The authenticated hard copies have already been uploaded on the CEO, West Bengal website.

Officials clarified that although the system may have automatically generated hearing notices for such electors, they should not be called for hearings at this stage and the notices will be retained by EROs or AEROs without being served. Electors who have received notices but fall under this category may skip the hearing, as their names will be automatically included in the final list once authenticated by BLOs. Extracts from the 2002 roll will be sent to DEOs for verification as per ECI guidelines, following which EROs or AEROs will decide on case disposal and upload necessary documents. BLOs may also conduct field visits, take photographs with electors and upload them for verification, though officials cautioned that discrepancies or complaints could still lead to hearings after due notice. Meanwhile, CEO Agarwal has been provided ‘Y plus’ category security from Saturday, with central forces deployed at the CEO office following past incidents involving protests by BLOs. Despite heightened security, hearings across the state proceeded peacefully on Saturday. Senior Deputy Election Commissioner Gyanesh Bharti, along with other senior ECI officials, is scheduled to visit West Bengal on December 30 to supervise the hearing exercise.