The 2019 Lok Sabha elections may be a year away but the poll bells have started ringing and so have the doorbells in the houses of the voters. Booth level officers have started making door to door calls in Salt Lake from this Tuesday.
Chief election commissioner of India Om Prakash Rawat held a meeting with state chief electoral officer Ariz Aftab and other officials on Monday at Swissotel.
The meeting has kicked off pre-electoral roll revision activities in Bidhannagar sub-division along with the rest of the state. According to official sources, the booth level officers were trained on June 11 before being sent out for special summary revision of rolls. “Those who will turn 18 on January 1, 2019 will be identified and asked to fill up Form 6 (for inclusion in electoral rolls) once they turn 18. Since many youngsters go out of town for higher studies and are unavailable when the exercise starts, we have taken special drives this time, holding meetings in block community halls,” said an official associated with the exercise.
The bigger aim of the exercise is to weed out the deceased and the shifted voters from the electoral list. “Sometimes people move in from another city and apply for a fresh voter card with a new EPIC number. Now we have a software that searches the database for matches based on names and pictures and automatically generates Form 7 (for deletion from electoral rolls) at the former constituency of a voter. All the SDO has to do is sign on it for the deduplication to take effect,” an official said.
The door-to-door visits will continue till June 30. June 17 and 23 have been marked as special campaign days. “On these days, the booth level officers will sit at the local booths. The booth level agents of political parties may also sit with them. This is primarily for youths who have recently come of age to get their names registered on the list. Corrections in existing data can also be done.”
Officials are now busy scouting for venues to create auxiliary polling stations in areas where the voter count has crossed 1,350 at a single station. A draft publication of the revision will be made on which views of political parties will be sought and then the change formalised.
Poll with paper trail
A building is coming up in the compound of the Bidhannagar sub-divisional office which will act as the go-down for electronic voting machines and Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) machines for three Assemble constituencies - 115 (Rajarhat-New Town), 116 (Bidhannagar) and 117 (Rajarhat-Gopalpur). “So long these machines were kept at Barasat.”
The VVPAT system will be mandatory from the upcoming Lok Sabha election whereby a printer with a drop box will be attached to the voting machine for maintaining a printing paper trail of the votes cast. “When you press on the EVM, the signal will now pass to the VVPAT machine and a chit of paper bearing the symbol on which you have pressed will pop up under a transparent screen in the machine for you to see before automatically dropping off inside the machine,” the official explained.
