East Singhbhum administration has embarked on a drive to verify the deleted voters following directions from Election Commission of India (ECI) principal secretary RK Srivastava to ensure that not a single eligible voter is missed.
“Election Commission has asked us no one should be missing from the revised electoral rolls. The deadline to prepare the final voter’s list is June 20. We are going for a door-to-door survey of the missing voters,” said a district official.
Deputy commissioner Amitabh Kaushal kicked-off the survey that will continue till June 15. “We hope to complete the verification drive by June 15. All the administrative officials would be visiting those booths and even houses having large number of deleted voters across the district to verify presence of voters,” said Kaushal.
The DC further said that 50 deleted voters were verified and out of which only 18 voters were found eligible for filling of form 6 to get their name again in the voters list while three persons had already died.
The revised electoral roll would be published on July 1. Earlier, it was the booth level officers (BlOs), largely state owned school teachers and anganbari sevikas who used to take part in the survey and also verification of voters, mostly at the respective polling booths. There are 1626 BlOs in East Singhbhum for as many polling booths.
The drive was necessitated following poll panel taking serious note of deletion of voters with ECI principal secretary expressing concern that at 88,000 voters missing from the electoral rolls. East Singhbhum is second after Dhanbad (1.43 lakhs voters) in terms of missing voters from electoral rolls. There are 14, 52, 501 voters in East Singhbhum .