Hyderabad

The Congress has alleged that despite the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) exercise seeking to delete duplicate voters, several duplicate voters are still on the draft rolls. And, the party has raised concerns over this.

District Congress Committee (DCC) president Syed Khalid Saifullah said that his office has found scores of duplicate voters in Yakutpura constituency. He demanded that this be looked into immediately.

“The very idea of the SIR is to remove duplicate voters. After going through the draft rolls, I have found that there are several electors who have figured twice. This is concerning,” Mr. Saifullah told , adding that the list that they compiled has side-by-side electoral records identified by the party as possible duplicate cases.

“Many entries carry identical or closely matching names, relatives’ names and photographs while showing differences in EPIC numbers, polling parts, addresses, ages or other electoral particulars,” he said.

Another issue which party booth level agents are finding tough is identifying houses of those who are on the ASDD list. The list that has been supplied does not have addresses. BLAs have been left wondering on how to reach out to such people given that in the absence of proper addresses it becomes tough to reach out, and verify their status.

Commenting on how these ‘duplicates’ could have remained, Mr. Saifullah said that it was possible that the booth level officer did not go to the respective residences of electors. He underscored that several BLOs were sitting at a common place from where enumeration forms were distributed, or collected.

“Had each BLO visited each house, duplicate voters would have been noted. We will give the benefit of doubt to electors as they would know that filling two enumeration forms is a crime. Then the question is, who has filled them, and who knows elector details?” he said.

Now, the DCC is demanding that the ECI provide the complete anomalies list, and unmapped voter list, to political parties. Further, data, especially the ASDD list, must contain house numbers and sufficient address details.

“A thorough verification of apparent duplicate entries detected after the SIR exercise must be done,” he said.