The Hindu : Front Page : Photo rolls may play a key role in bypoll

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Wednesday, Sep 06, 2006

Front Page

Front Page

Photo rolls may play a key role in bypoll

Staff Reporter

Launched as a pilot project, the exercise is a success with 92 per cent coverage

MADURAI : Byelection to the Madurai Central Assembly constituency will probably see a very few complaints of bogus voting, thanks to photo rolls.

Launched as a pilot project, the photo rolls exercise has emerged a success with 92 per cent coverage of the total 1,32,231 voters in the constituency.

The Corporation Commissioner and Electoral Registration Officer, D.J. Dhinakkaren, released the final photo rolls here on Tuesday. While women outnumbered men in the photo rolls, the exact figures are being worked out.

In a door-to-door exercise, hundreds of employees were deployed on election duty during the last two months. While the names of 7,415 persons were deleted from the voters' list, as they were not found to be residing in the constituency ordinarily, 4,957 inclusions were made after thorough scrutiny.

Before deleting names, officials served show cause notices on voters and sent copies to the recognised national political parties. "Efforts will be made to achieve the 100 per cent target. This will be a foolproof mechanism where the chances of bogus voting are ruled out. Even if a voter turns up at the polling booth without any document, his genuineness can be ascertained," the Collector, T. Udhayachandran, said.

Special teams used checklists to correct mismatch of images and addresses.

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