Admitting that a large number of dubious/bogus voters are listed in the electoral rolls, the Electoral Office of Delhi has decided to remove around 12 lakh (10 per cent) such voters from the electoral rolls.
At present, there are 1.23 crore voters listed in the electoral rolls of Delhi. Of these, 12 lakh dubious voters would be removed. In other words, 10 per cent dubious/bogus voters of the total electorate have been voting in the elections in Delhi. It is learnt that voters who are actually dead or those with fake addresses exercised their franchise without any hurdles.
The Pioneer had reported that ‘Delhi has over 14 lakh fake voters,’ on January 28. This has been found after a door-to-door survey by the Chief Electoral Office of Delhi.
Sources in the Chief Electoral Office of Delhi said that after scrutiny, it was found that around 12 lakh voters in the electoral rolls are dubious/bogus. These 12 lakh voters are part of the total 1.23 crore voters on the electoral rolls. “These fictitious voters are spread across the city and must have been exploited by vested interests in the last Assembly polls,” said the sources.
Incidentally, most of the localities where fake voters have been found in a large number are strongholds of the Congress and the BJP.
Assembly constituencies like Karawal Nagar, Matiala, Uttam Nagar, New Delhi, RK Puram, Okhla, Greater Kailash, Mustafabad, Kasturba Nagar, Najafgarh, Delhi Cantt, Bawana, Dwarka, Adarsh Nagar, Babarpur, Kirari, Rohini, Mangolpuri, Mundka, Kalkaji, Seelampur and Model Town were found to have the maximum fake voters.
According to sources, a report to this effect has been sent to the Election Commission of India.
Former Delhi BJP president Dr Harshvardhan said that he had requested the electoral office to find out dubious voters in his constituency Krishna Nagar.
Delhi Nationalist Congress Party Election Committee chairman Ramvir Singh Bidhuri insists the problem of such bogus votes is most profound in the peripheral constituencies of the city. The ruling Congress had got 40.36 per cent while the Opposition BJP got 36.34 per cent votes in the Assembly elections in 2008.
There were Assembly seats like Ghonda, where the BJP won by a margin of just 500 votes. There were several constituencies in Delhi where the margin of victory was less than 5,000. There were dozens of Assembly seats where the victory margin was over 15,000 to 20,000 votes. In the last municipal elections, a sitting councilor had won by 1,800 votes and the same has been challenged in the court of law. He is facing charges of adding ghost voters in the voters list for winning the elections. The charges are under investigations and preliminary reports indicate that some 2,000 voters were bogus ones and there were other glaring anomalies in the list of the municipal ward that falls in North Delhi Municipal Corporation, sources said.
According to sources, most of the bogus voters were found in unauthorized colonies where the margin of victory was between 15,000 and 20,000 in the 2008 Assembly polls.
The door-to-door survey conducted in January this year, reveals that around 11 per cent of the total electorate does not exist. Around 14.78 lakh entries in the electoral rolls have been identified as shifted/expired and replicated. Of these 6,60,407 voters have either shifted or do not live at their given addresses while 78,217 were found dead and 30,158 replicated.
According to officials, summery revision would start from July 1 and it would continue till September 1. The final electoral list would be published on September 1. This time the election office is working on a plan to give unique epic number (10 digit) to all voters. There were 2.5 lakh voter cards with wrong numbers, but this has been rectified.