Not at home when booth level officers knocked? Don’t miss their calls now
Times of India | 3 December 2025
Kolkata: If you receive a call from an unknown number, do not ignore it. It may be from your BLO.
The EC has mandated every BLO to verify the authenticity of an absentee applicant whose enumeration form contains the signature of any of his or her family members. The BLOs will also need to determine whether the absentee applicants are voters in any other place in India.
Issuing an instruction on Monday night, Manoj Agarwal, chief electoral officer, West Bengal, said, "In cases where a family member has signed on behalf of an absentee member, the BLO must check the veracity of the applicant over a phone call, house visit, etc., and also ascertain that he is not a voter in any other place in the country." This instruction has been issued to verify the absentee voter and ensure that his or her name is not registered in the electoral roll anywhere else in a bid to weed out duplicate voters from the draft SIR list to be published on Dec 16, a senior official said.
"Any family member of an absentee applicant can sign the form on his or her behalf. However, whether the applicant is genuine or not, the BLO will have to ensure. During the collection of form or before digitising it, the BLO should inquire about the absentee applicant from his or her family member, like where the person currently lives and for how long, what is the purpose of his or her stay away from home, etc. Then the BLO should call the person personally to verify those details," the official added.
The BLO can also check whether the name of an applicant is mentioned in the SIR roll of any state/UT besides Bengal on the BLO App itself. "A BLO has access to the last SIR roll of every state and UT on the BLO App. The BLO can easily find out anyone's name by putting the name of the assembly constituency, part number, and serial number of an applicant with mapped data in the last SIR roll of any state/UT. If someone's name is mentioned in more than one SIR roll, all details will be shown there and a BLO can ascertain any duplicate voter," another official said.
However, if the name of an applicant is mentioned in the latest electoral roll of more than one state/UT, the BLO cannot ascertain it and the same will be identified by running two software tools by the EC. The CEO also instructed all concerned SIR officials to check details of self-mapping voters aged 60 years or above in 2002.
The BLOs will also have to verify cases where names of parents mapped by BLOs do not match with names of parents in the 2025 roll published on Oct 28 through field visit or phone call. "All booths where the progeny mapping is 50% or more of the total mapping in the booth should be scrutinised thoroughly," the EC said.