Election Commission Directive
The officers will prepare a list of all such electors and facilitate their enrolment through Form 6, if the voters are eligible. Each BLO may cover at least 20-25 electors a week and complete the exercise in around a month, the letter says. A govt official said that the SIR clause of mapping fresh voters with their parents or grandparents was dropped this time while filling Form 6. Officials had earlier told TOI there was a huge backlog of Form 6 applications in Bengal. More than 60 lakh were put under adjudication on the final roll; 27 lakh of them were deleted later. The appellate tribunals received over 22 lakh appeals for reinstatement.
A letter from Election Commission , which has reached all district election officers (DEOs), instructs BLOs to go on “house-to-house visits” to identify voters whose names were deleted. They have to compare the “current electoral roll with the pre-SIR electoral roll and identify such electors whose names were there in the pre-SIR roll but are not included in the current electoral roll”. “DEOs were told to engage BLOs for house visits to identify deleted voters. Special camps will also be held to enroll fresh and left-out voters,” an official present at the videoconference said. “The plan is to conduct special camps at colleges and one camp in each booth so that young voters can enroll,” said a DEO. More than 58 lakh voters were marked “absent, shifted, deleted and dead” in the SIR draft roll.
Many electoral registration officers were removed from their posts after the assembly election with no replacement. Many DEOs have already relayed the instructions to electoral registration officers (EROs), the authority for inclusion of names in an assembly constituency. BLOs work under EROs and assistant EROs.
Bengal’s chief electoral officer (CEO) Neelam Meena reiterated the directive to DEOs in a videoconference on Thursday.