Pinky Saha (name changed on request), 20, will vote for the first time this election, as herself that is. In five previous elections, she has cast her vote many times, but always as someone else.

Pinky’s first experience of proxy voting was in 1999. The slum girl from Shyampukur, then barely 10, was asked to stand in for a 50-year-old woman from the neighbourhood. She hasn’t looked back since.

“I was a little nervous the first time because I was only 10. But by the end of the day, I had cast 15 votes for women aged between 18 and 60,” she boasts.

Her reward was a plate of mutton biryani. “The food was great. All of us who voted (on behalf of others, and without their knowledge) were invited to a feast, which was almost like a picnic,” recalls Pinky, who works as a domestic help and moonlights as a beautician on call.

Now that she is a legal voter, would she mind if a supporter of a rival party usurped her right to vote?

“Of course; I want to cast my own vote,” she asserts.

Pinky is not the only serial voter in the Saha family. Neither are the Sahas the only such voters in the Shyampukur slum. Speak to the Deys, the Choudhurys and the Pals next door and you realise that all of them have masqueraded as someone else in one election or the other.

The slum in which Pinky lives is home to nearly 500 people. If each of them averages 10 visits to the booth in an election, it works out to 5,000 illegal votes from just one colony.

“Shyampukur or Shyambazar, everyone does it. Do you think the authorities don’t know that this happens?” asks Pinky.

She is, in fact, quite proud of her proxy prowess. “Our family of five casts around 75 votes for our party every election. Two of my cousins and many in the slum have two voter identity cards each, one bearing the real name and the other with some other name,” says Pinky.

Has she ever been caught?

“Just once, in 2006. I was trying to enter the booth at Duff School to vote in the name of a 67-year-old woman. A turbaned policeman stopped me at the gate and asked me whether I was trying to fool him. He then smiled and asked me to leave if I wanted to avoid arrest,” chuckles Pinky.

The proxy veteran that she was, Pinky returned to the booth before the close of voting. “The strict policeman I had encountered earlier was not there and I entered easily. I cast 12 votes at different booths that day.”

According to Pinky, polling agents and local police personnel “manage” the booths in Shyampukur. “The election officials are spectators.”

What about the supposedly indelible mark of ink on the index finger? “The police, polling agents and election officials pretend not to notice the mark. Some recognise me but look the other way,” shrugs Pinky. “And at times the ink can be easily rubbed off.”

But for all her experience as a proxy voter and knowledge of how polls are rigged, Pinky hasn’t quite kept up with politics since her first proxy vote.

Asked what she likes about the chief minister, she says: “Jyoti Babu is a sweet old man.”

Err, what about Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee? “I am not sure what position he holds!”

Chief electoral officer Debashis Sen is confident that Pinky will find it impossible to cast more than her own vote this time.

“We have photographs of voters on the lists now. Identity cards have been issued to more than 95 per cent of the electorate. Then there will be micro-observers, digital cameras and video cameras at the booths. Trust me, it will be impossible for the likes of her to masquerade as someone else,” promises Sen.