The Election Commission of India (ECI) wants people to vote in the area where they reside and is urging to get their names shifted if they do not.
“We do not want situations where a person lives in Salt Lake but the address in his or her voter card is in, say, Howrah or Burrabazar. It goes against the principle of local representation if a person who does not stay in the area and, therefore, has no idea about the performance of the local representative lands in the area on election day to cast his or her vote. Neither is it an ideal situation if many residents of an area have no voting right to decide the local representative. Such people everywhere are not being handed SIR forms, as they are obviously absent at the voting address, or are being handed one with the advice to apply for a shift to their residential address,” said a senior official involved with the special intensive revision (SIR) of electoral rolls, that is currently underway across the state.
A list is being prepared by the BLOs of such names. “These voters will be required to fill up Form 8 seeking a shift in address once the draft list is finalized,” the official said.
A total of 44,934 names have not made it to the draft publication of electoral rolls for 116 Bidhannagar Assembly constituency. This is 18.17 per cent of the total number of electors in the area that includes Salt Lake and 10 wards of South Dum Dum Municipality. The figure includes dead and shifted voters.
The constituency has 2,47,304 electors in the pre-SIR list and forms were printed for all of them. Of the 2,02,370 voters who were handed forms by the booth level officials (BLO), 38,213 names could not be mapped.
“A total of 38,207 names have come up for hearing. Of them, 5,363 names are of electors whose names feature in the 2002 voter list but the app showed a data error due to mismatch. The 2002 list was in pdf format, which is not searchable. To make that list searchable on the BLO app, a new version was created which has led to five to 15 per cent errors creeping in during the transfer.” Earlier this week, the ECI has decided to exempt such voters from being called to the hearing.
Hearings are currently underway for the remaining 32,844 people for lack of sufficient documents and inability to map with the 2002 list. A total of 20 venues, mostly schools and other educational institutes, along with the sub-divisional office in DJ Block have been chosen as venues. About 150 hearings can take place daily at each venue, with the sub-divisional office (SDO) handling a total of about 1,500 hearings from the vicinity.
Fifteen micro-observers appointed by ECI, who have arrived from the districts, are attending the hearings as well. The finance secretary, Randhir Kumar, is in charge as roll observer for the district.
“We are trying to complete the hearings by January. The ECI had wanted the hearings to end by January 25 but because the number in this constituency is over 30,000, we will be unable to finish earlier,” an official said. Incidentally, North 24-Parganas, which includes an extensive area on the international border with Bangladesh, has emerged as the district requiring the highest number of hearings in the state.
“We will also have to deal with new voters and those who could not submit the SIR form due to temporary absence. Those who have shifted will also apply with Form 8. The summary revision of electoral rolls will take place simultaneously besides SIR. So those hearings will have to happen as well at the SDO,” he said.