Bengaluru: With the Election Commission rationalising allocation of polling stations in its bid to assign booths within 2km from home or stick to a maximum of 1,200 voters in a booth in the special intensive revision (SIR), several families find themselves in different booths.
An official from the chief electoral officer’s office said around 1,875 polling stations had been added during SIR. Because their members were mapped to different polling stations, however, during enumeration, some families had multiple BLOs visiting their homes.
“All members of a family were identified as one unit and allocated the same booth,” an official said.
Raj Kumar said his 22-year-old son had been assigned a booth in the neighbouring CV Raman Nagar constituency, while the rest of the family was listed in Shanti Nagar. We have lived in this house for 50 years, and the previous rolls placed him in the neighbouring constituency. We do not know if we can apply through Form 8, which requires an old and a new address.
Despite the exercise being aimed at cleaning up electoral rolls, voters reported errors in age, names and addresses.
However, volunteers assisting voters said those relying on pre-SIR part and serial numbers would struggle to trace their entries in the revised rolls. A resident of RT Nagar said the changes should have been reflected in the draft rolls but were not. In our case, there has always been just one address,” he said. “My age has been increased by three years,” said a voter from Dakshina Kannada. A Bengaluru voter said a correction sought through the BLO had not been incorporated. “I am 54, but have been listed as 56, even after seeking corrections,” the voter said. BLO Nagarathnamma said she had entered all the details provided to her. “Wherever the information was vague, neighbours helped us identify voters using their photographs,” she said. Yelahanka had the highest progress with the lowest deletions,” he said.
The Election Commission’s ECInet app displays the latest details when a voter’s EPIC number is entered. Voters in Bengaluru, however, questioned whether the rationalisation had been properly implemented. “There was no change to the booth allotted to my son. We hoped SIR would set this right. In a Yelahanka polling booth, several entries had incomplete addresses. Some house numbers were replaced with a dot or a hyphen, while others carried landmarks such as Palekamma temple or Ganesh temple. Yelahanka ERO Maruthi attributed some discrepancies to possible data entry errors and promised a review. “There was no issue with the software.