SIR in Bengaluru
Bengaluru: Months after the special intensive revision (SIR) was billed as a clean-up of electoral rolls, voters across Karnataka are finding the final rolls riddled with duplicate entries, garbled names, incorrect ages, and incomplete addresses.
Election officials were unreachable for comment on how duplicates made it to the rolls, for which 5.5 crore voters went through re-verification and 43 lakh had to submit documents to prove their eligibility. Similar cases were reported in Bengaluru.
Hers is one of over 1,000 such cases in a single Bengaluru constituency, according to MP Mansoor Ali Khan , who had earlier flagged instances of “vote chori” in Mahadevapura. He said the duplicates have now carried over to the final SIR rolls. “I’ve been marked three years older than my age right now,” said a voter from Mangaluru. Some ministers favoured using the final electoral rolls published recently after completion of SIR exercise, according to sources. Rural development and panchayat raj (RDPR) minister Eshwar B Khandre said the cabinet discussed the issue and several opinions were expressed. He said state election commission will take a final call on which electoral rolls should be used for local body elections.
Ages are also off. Voters across the state report being assigned ages greater than their actual ages. They argued that the revision had been conducted systematically in Karnataka, with only minor discrepancies compared to other states. Others, however, favoured using the rolls prepared by Election Commission of India (ECI) before SIR.