The Election Commission will conduct nearly seven lakh hearings per day from Monday to complete the hearings of 95 lakh voters flagged with logical discrepancies in their enumeration forms by February 7, the last date of the hearing and verification phase.

The EC was conducting hearings at 3,234 hearing centres across the state so far. But it has decided to raise the number of centres to about 6,500 from next week to expedite the hearing process.

“We have completed hearings of 32 lakh unmapped voters, who did not link themselves to the 2002 electoral rolls through self or progeny mapping. We need to complete the hearings for 95 lakh voters with discrepancies in their enumeration forms by the end of January. For this, we will increase the number of hearing centres from next week,” said a poll panel official.

“The EC has approved a proposal to appoint more assistant electoral registration officers (AEROs) and micro-observers to run the additional hearing centres. Appointment of additional micro-observers and AEROs has been completed, and the additional hearing centres are expected to be functional from early next week,” said a source.

Initially, the EC had announced hearings for 32 lakh unmapped voters. But later on, it was decided that the voters with “logical discrepancies” in the forms would also be heard.

A total of 1.67 crore voters had been earlier flagged with logical discrepancies in their enumeration forms. The commission later cut down the number through verification by the BLOs.

“The minor discrepancies like mismatch of names because of spelling errors were corrected, and the number of voters with logical discrepancies in the forms was brought down to 95 lakh. Now, as the BLOs could not clear doubts over these voters, all of them would have to attend the hearing.
Of these 95 lakh voters, 24.21 lakh would be called as sets of six or more, among them had mapped themselves to the same parent figure in the 2002 post-SIR rolls.

“The BLOs could not clear doubts about them, and that’s why they are being called for a hearing,” said a source.

Apart from these, another 11.95 lakh voters linked themselves to voters in enrolled in the 2002 rolls who are older by 15 years or less.

According to the poll panel, this is highly suspicious, and that’s why they would be called for a hearing and verification.