‘North Kolkata accounts for highest percentage of deceased voters across state’

Kolkata: North Kolkata accounts for the highest percentage of deceased voters across the state, as per information available based on the ongoing Special Intensive Revision (SIR) exercise being held in Bengal.

As per data available from the office of the Bengal Chief Electoral Officer (CEO), out of 22.30 lakh dead voters identified till Tuesday evening, North Kolkata accounts for 1,04 ,076 voters which is 6.9 per cent of the total electors under the jurisdiction of District Electoral Officer (DEO), North Kolkata.

In South Kolkata, 54,985 voters have been identified as deceased which accounts for 6 per cent of the total electors within the jurisdiction of DEO South.

The Election Commission on Tuesday had informed that over 46.20 lakh names have not matched so far with the voter list of 2002, based on the current pace of digitising enumeration forms submitted by booth-level officers (BLO). Among these, the number of dead voters were 22.28 lakh, untraceable 6.41 lakh, over 16.22 lakh have shifted out of their registered addresses while 1.05 lakh were identified as bogus voters.

The Commission has made it clear that this is an evolving estimate, since the projection reflects the digitisation status only till Tuesday (4 pm), the exclusion figure may rise as more forms are processed. The number of dead voters in the two bordering Kolkata districts North 24-Parganas and South 24-Parganas are also quite high where 3.4 and 3.2 per cent of the total electors respectively have been identified deceased.

East Midnapore so far has the least number of dead voters in percentage with 1.4 per cent of the total voters under the dead category.

The Commission has issued directions for verifying the details of those voters whose names are not in the 2002 list, which has been earmarked as the base for conducting the present

SIR exercise.