ECI extends SIR, door-to-door voter verification till August 17

The Election Commission of India (ECI) on Tuesday revised the SIR (Special Intensive Revision) dates in Delhi, with the door-to-door verification exercise by booth-level officers (BLOs) extended till August 17 and the publication of electoral rolls rescheduled for October 27.

This is the second extension for the revision of voter rolls in the Capital this month. The door-to-door verification exercise currently underway was earlier scheduled to conclude on August 8.

According to the poll panel, the draft electoral rolls will now be published on August 24, instead of August 17. After publication of the draft rolls, the voters will be able to file their claims and objections from August 24 to September 23, as per the revised schedule. Earlier, the claims and objection filing period was August 17 to September 16.

The claims and objections filed by the voters will have to be disposed of by the poll officials between August 24 and October 22.

The final voter lists will be published on October 27, instead of October 19 as scheduled earlier. Currently, the BLOs in Delhi have distributed enumeration forms to almost all the 1.45 crore voters in the city, while over 62 per cent of the filled-up forms were digitised.

As per the details shared by the EC, Enumeration forms for Delhi’s SIR of electoral rolls have been distributed to 1,45,08,587 of the city’s 1,45,10,298 registered electors, achieving 99.99 percent coverage as of 8 pm on Tuesday. All 12 of Delhi’s 13 districts reached 100 per cent distribution, and 91,74,992 forms were digitised, representing 63.23 per cent of the total electorate.

The only district yet to achieve 100 per cent distribution is North West, which stands at 99.87 per cent with 12,75,414 forms distributed out of 12,77,126 electors. All other 12 districts have achieved complete distribution. On digitisation, Outer North leads at 73.33 per cent, followed by South West at 71.33 per cent and West at 70.13 per cent. The lowest digitisation rates are in South East at 50.60 per cent and the East at 57.10 per cent, indicating that the backend data entry work is proceeding at different speeds across districts even as physical distribution is nearly complete.

Before this extension, the last date for the door-to-door verification exercise by BLOs was August 8. The Delhi Chief Electoral Officer (CEO), in a press statement, said that the fresh extension was aimed at giving some more time to voters for submitting their filled-up enumeration forms.

The process of digitisation of enumeration forms submitted by the voters has been a little slower in Delhi due to multiple reasons. The Delhi CEO office has requested the voters who have still not submitted their enumeration forms to do so at the earliest.

According to the poll officials, the names of around 20 per cent voters may be deleted in the draft publication due to multiple reasons, especially on account of people moving to new locations from their registered addresses.

The BLOs have claimed that many voters have yet to return the forms provided to them. Errors in details provided by the voters, technical issues, difficulty in finding voter details previously recorded, etc., have also been cited as factors delaying the digitisation of enumeration forms.

Some other BLOs complained that the “biggest hurdle” now is that many voters have not returned the enumeration forms after filling them up because of difficulty in finding details from the 2002 SIR. There are many who came to Delhi and became voters after 2002 and have to trace their details in the SIR of their home state, which is even more complicated, they said.

The BLOs also said that many people took multiple enumeration forms on behalf of their family members and did not return them after completing them. All such forms will be finally marked as “uncollectable”, further adding to the workload.

Some BLOs also claimed that technical issues were encountered in operating the BLO-Net app used for the digitisation process. “Verification exercise was slowed by technical problems with the app in the initial weeks,” they claimed.