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New Delhi, Oct 27 (IANS) After a highly successful voter verification process, a special intensive verification (SIR) drive will be conducted in 12 states/Union Territories (UTs) and the voter lists of those respective provinces will be locked tonight, Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) Gyanesh Kumar said on Monday.
Briefing the media about the impending voter list revision exercise, the CEC congratulated the polling officials as well as the voters for the successful SIR in Bihar and explained in detail the process and rationale for conducting ‘purification drives’ from time to time.
The CEC said that since independence, SIR in the country has been conducted 8 times between 1951 and 2004 and the last one was in 2004. He said political parties have been repeatedly insisting on voter verification to ensure that only legitimate voters participate in the electoral process.
He said it is necessary to clean the voter list after every few years due to reasons like voter duplication, deletion of names of people who have either died or have permanently moved out of the election state.
Explaining the specifics of the SIR exercise, the CEC said that enumeration forms will be printed for the states where it will be done and the voter lists of those states will be frozen on Monday night.
Hinting at the pan-India SIR rollout, he said it was first launched in Bihar and would soon be implemented in other states.
Usually, there are 1,000 voters at 1 polling station. There are 300-400 polling stations in an assembly under the supervision of 1 Electoral Registration Officer (ERO). BLOs work under the guidance of ERO and voter lists are prepared and later they are interrogated.
Further, breaking down the process, he informed that BLOs will first distribute enumeration forms to voters, enabling them to verify their details through ‘digital linking’ to previous records.
“If there has been no change since 2003, there is no need to link with old EPIC cards, but those whose names are not linked with the previous records will have to submit any documents asked by the poll panel,” he said.
“BLOs will visit each house three times,” he said.
The draft and final voter list will be published by EROs and Deputy EROs as it is their responsibility to publish error free voter list.
The CEC also appealed to the six national parties to appoint their respective BLOs and said that Chief Electoral Officers, District Electoral Officers (DROs) and EROs have been asked to hold detailed talks with political parties and explain to them in detail about the ‘purging’ exercise.
–IANS
shri/row