The Hindu : Karnataka / Bangalore News : Missing names: are political parties responsible for it?

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Missing names: are political parties responsible for it?

Bangalore Bureau

A draft list known as ‘Mother Roll’ was published on November 10, 2008 after the Assembly polls
EC sources said parties either did not distribute the second supplementary list to workers

BANGALORE: Failure by the political parties to “update” their electoral rolls is said to be the main reason for the Thursday’s episode of several voters unable to exercise their franchise in the first phase of polling as they did not find their names in the voters’ list, according to sources in the Election Commission.

According to them, the voters’ list had been revised after the Assembly elections in 2008 till April 2009. A draft list was published on November 10, 2008 which is known as “Mother Roll” after the Assembly elections.

A first supplementary roll had been published on February 10 after revising it by processing the applications for inclusion and deletion of names.

After the Lok Sabha elections were announced,

The second supplementary roll was published on April 10 by undertaking a revision exercise till March 25, 2009 when they received applications for including 10 lakh names and deleting 60,000 names.

The sources said that all these three lists were given to political parties for verification and were also put up on notice boards in some of the public offices, besides displaying on the website.

The second supplementary list had deleted some 60,000 names from the earlier lists and hence the political parties were supposed to round them off from the earlier lists. It also included nearly 10 lakh new names.

The sources said that political parties either did not distribute the second supplementary list to their workers at all the booths or had failed to effect changes as per this in their earlier lists. At the same time, officials at the booth had been given a consolidated and authenticated list which included all the changes and hence there was a difference in the lists possessed by the political parties and the polling officials.

Though the EC had for the first time appealed to the political parties to appoint booth-level agents to go through these lists and update them to remove the confusion, the political parties showed a lukewarm response to it, the sources said.

Following this, the EC had set up a voters’ assistance centre near the polling booths on the polling day to help voters to identify their names with the help of a consolidated and alphabetically-arranged voters’ list.

But the confusion prevailed as most of the voters went only to the tables of political parties which did not have updated lists, the sources alleged.

Referring to the cases where the names of voters were missing from the official lists also, they said that such a thing would not have happened if the voters had noticed the changes in the lists earlier.

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