The Election Commission of India to launch a fortnight long intensive campaign to weed out duplicate entries in the electoral roll from September 26 to October 10.
Spokesperson said that the ECI had initiated a programme for special summary of photo electoral rolls with reference to January 1, 2015, as qualifying date. “This programme started with the training and orientation of EROs or AEROs from July 22 to 30 followed by appointment of booth level officers (BlOs) from July 31 to August 7 and trainings and orientation of BlOs from August 8 to 23,” he said.
As per existing policy, revision of electoral rolls with reference to January 1 of the coming year as the qualifying date is done in later part of each year in all States or UTs (normally in the months of October-December) so that final publication of the electoral rolls could be made in the first week of January of the succeeding year.
An official spokesperson of Punjab Chief Electoral Office stated, “In this exercise, the Commission’s full emphasis is on having pure and error free rolls which form the basis for free and fair elections.”
“For achieving high fidelity electoral rolls, pre-revision activities are required to be given the same weightage as revision activities. If pre-revision activities start now, we will have sufficient time for doing them before announcement of schedule for revision of electoral rolls with reference to January 1, 2015, as the qualifying date,” he added.
The photography campaign for residual electors, whose images are not available in the roll (house to house campaign to collect the images of residual elector) started on August 8 and would continue till October 10.
The preparation of CEO’s website for draft publication of integrated rolls and providing search facility and standardization of search facility at website will be by October 16. The updating of control tables (including polling station updating) and database will be done by October 22.