The Congress has urged the Election Commission to be transparent about its rules and procedures amid issues with the mapping of voters and repeated extension of deadlines in the second phase of the special intensive revision (SIR) of voter rolls.
The party's Tamil Nadu MP Sasikanth Senthil cited a news report on the reintroduction of a software to detect voter duplication without any clarification on safeguards by the poll panel.
He said: “As the second phase (of SIR) for the 12 states is declared, the Election Commission suddenly, after telling the Supreme Court that we are not using this in Bihar and that this software is not that great, suddenly brought back that software in these 12 states again…. There is no transparency on why this was done."
He said the BLO app was being updated every day with some new protocol. "If you are a BLO... and the app shows that there are two duplicates in your booth. What to do with them? There is no protocol for this. There is no training for this," he said.
Senthil also flagged the lack of clarity on the "relatives" with whom the voters needed to link their names in the enumeration forms.
“Nobody is able to understand what they are trying to do, but the biggest impact of whatever they are trying to do is going to fall on the poor people of this country. Those who are illiterate, those who don't have a voice... they will definitely suffer immensely from this entire SIR process,” the Tamil Nadu MP said.
"By keeping the control with them, by not being transparent, and continuously changing the rules every day, and not even giving any written clarification of what is happening, they are putting the country in doubt,” he said.