If the Election Commission is to be believed, only 26 voters in Mumbai’s Anushakti Nagar area, which has two lakh citizens, have died over the last five years. On the other hand, 6,063 voters died in southern Byculla during the same period.
These discrepancies should have caught the attention of officials in the Election Commission as it revised the voters rolls for the 2014 Lok Saba election and served as a warning that there were flaws in the way the lists were being prepared.
“Election officers don’t realise the law of large numbers,” said Praveen Chakravarti, a former member of the Unique Identification Authority of India. “You can’t have wild swings."
When the city went to the polls on April 24, thousands of eligible voters found their names missing.
According to the NGOs Action for Good Governance and Networking in India and Birthright, 2.1 lakh people were deleted from the rolls. On Wednesday, they filed a PIL in the Bombay High Court stating they have received 6,500 complaints from people who were mistakenly removed from the rolls for being dead, absent or having shifted. They have asked the court to permit these complainants to register their votes before counting day on May 16.
The Maharashtra wing of the EC has been criticised extensively for its shoddy work in updating the rolls. In a massive exercise begun two years ago, the Commission began to revise its photo electoral rolls. Election commissioner HS Brahma admitted on April 25, a day after the Mumbai election, that the EC had not supervised the process of updating the Maharashtra rolls effectively.
“This was the work of the block-level officers,” said Vedant Thakur, who manned the EC helpline on voting day, to Scroll.in. “They were supposed to update the rolls, but they did not do this properly everywhere.”
Part of the reason for this is an inadequate workforce. The Commission had to rely on underpaid schoolteachers to visit each house and confirm the status of each voter.
There are huge variations in the number of people deleted in various constituencies, as these charts of data gathered from Mumbai South and Mumbai South Central show.
In Mumbai South, 15,955 voters are said to have died, whereas in Mumbai South Central, less than half of that number did. Even within the constituencies, there are huge discrepancies from area to area. This should have alerted election officials that their process was not accurate, observers say.
These discrepancies should have caught the attention of officials in the Election Commission as it revised the voters rolls for the 2014 Lok Saba election and served as a warning that there were flaws in the way the lists were being prepared.
“Election officers don’t realise the law of large numbers,” said Praveen Chakravarti, a former member of the Unique Identification Authority of India. “You can’t have wild swings."
When the city went to the polls on April 24, thousands of eligible voters found their names missing.
According to the NGOs Action for Good Governance and Networking in India and Birthright, 2.1 lakh people were deleted from the rolls. On Wednesday, they filed a PIL in the Bombay High Court stating they have received 6,500 complaints from people who were mistakenly removed from the rolls for being dead, absent or having shifted. They have asked the court to permit these complainants to register their votes before counting day on May 16.
The Maharashtra wing of the EC has been criticised extensively for its shoddy work in updating the rolls. In a massive exercise begun two years ago, the Commission began to revise its photo electoral rolls. Election commissioner HS Brahma admitted on April 25, a day after the Mumbai election, that the EC had not supervised the process of updating the Maharashtra rolls effectively.
“This was the work of the block-level officers,” said Vedant Thakur, who manned the EC helpline on voting day, to Scroll.in. “They were supposed to update the rolls, but they did not do this properly everywhere.”
Part of the reason for this is an inadequate workforce. The Commission had to rely on underpaid schoolteachers to visit each house and confirm the status of each voter.
There are huge variations in the number of people deleted in various constituencies, as these charts of data gathered from Mumbai South and Mumbai South Central show.
In Mumbai South, 15,955 voters are said to have died, whereas in Mumbai South Central, less than half of that number did. Even within the constituencies, there are huge discrepancies from area to area. This should have alerted election officials that their process was not accurate, observers say.
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