Delhi voters get another chance to put names on electoral list

‘Delhi Chief Electoral Office is giving voters whose names have been deleted from the electoral list because of a change in address or some other reason a golden opportunity. They now have another chance to get their names included in the list. But this would be the last such chance given to them,’ warned Delhi chief electoral officer, Vijay Dev.

Dev said that  after a door-to-door check, Delhi Chief Electoral Office has finally deleted over 13,58,179 lakh bogus voters from the inflated electoral list of 1.23 crore against the normative Census average of 1.15 crore. Dev said, ‘We are going to organise 1,900 camps in the city for filing of claims and objections between 1 July to 22 July. Special meet with booth-level agents(BLAs) of political parties to inspect the roll and registering the corrections can be done between 7 July to 14 July.

After pruning the list of bogus voters, in a first-of-its-kind exercise undertaken in the history of Delhi elections, the State Election Commission (EC) is all set to publish its draft electoral roll on 1 July. With another set of summary revision before the elections, the EC will work on the deflated sections of the roll, which include women and youth voters, and publish the final version on 2 September. 

An official announcement in this regard will be made by the EC on Friday. Dev further said that  of the 13 lakh ‘bogus’ voters, those who had either moved away, or died or whose names had been duplicated, only a small section of those who have shifted to other areas, are expected to re-apply, as ‘many of them would have already got new voter cards, in case they have shifted houses within the city’.

A senior official in the department said in the old list, ‘many voters had invalid numbers on their cards or more than one person had the same number. All those mistakes have been rectified and now every voter has a unique EPIC number’. Another 7.70 lakh voters had no photographs accompanying their EPICs. The number of such voters was allegedly the highest in Delhi. Officials explained that absence of photographs on EPIC allows political parties to manipulate votes.

‘The Election Commission of India has mandated that there should be zero per cent non-image voters. Delhi had the highest number, 6 per cent. The number has already come down to 2.70 lakh, and there will be no non-image voters till the next summary revision,’ an official said. Dev said that the Delhi Electoral Office has decided to launch a mobile SMS service, which will enable voters to get details of their electoral roll on their phones.