Preparations for the coming Assembly elections in Telangana was expected to pick up pace with a team of Election Commission officials scheduled to visit Hyderabad on Sunday next and review the process of the revision of electoral rolls.
They will also discuss the preparations with the State officials and review the availability of the electronic voting machines and other material.
Meanwhile the revision of the electoral rolls has entered its last phase as receiving objections to the draft rolls, identifying the duplicate names and the fresh applications came to an end on Tuesday evening.
Chief Electoral Officer Rajath Kumar said that during the 25 days long process 25.88 lakh claims and objections were received by the officials, 17.9 lakh of them were for the fresh enrolment as voters.
In the second phase, which will continue till October 5, officials will take up field verification of the claims and objections, and notices will be issued to the voters whose names appear twice in the list.
The final voters list will be published on October 8, he said. The process has assumed a lot of significance in view of opposition parties complaining that lakhs of names of voters were deleted as part of a conspiracy and the election commission in nexus with the ruling TRS was showing haste in completing the process without giving proper opportunity to the voters. Main opposition Congress has even approached the Supreme Court for corrective measures. The petition was likely to come up for hearing on Thursday.
BJP has complained to the CEO that more than a lakh voters were deleted in the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation limits and due to changes in the schedule of revision many people could not get their names enrolled in the list.
Meanwhile the election authorities in Telangana have started the first phase the inspection of Electronic Voting Machines in the presence of the representatives of all political parties.
Election Officer for Hyderabad Dana Kishore held first such camp on Wednesday and inspected the machines and explained the process to the representatives of the political parties. He said that the process would continue over the next twenty days to cover all the assembly constituencies.
“Every day the EVMs will be tested by casting 16 types of sample votes”, he said.