The dates for holding the elections to the Legislative Assembly are yet to be announced. The OCEO, however, has loads of work in hand - revising the electoral rolls throughout the State. And the work is on at a brisk pace.

The revised electoral rolls will be ready and made public on  January 10 next. The revised rolls will be kept for public scrutiny at the OCEO, urban local body offices and also hosted on a website to be launched by the OCEO.

R Ramaseshan, Chief Electoral Officer, said the Chief Election Commission, New Delhi has appointed four Chief Electoral Officers (CEOs) from four States, to oversee the revision of electoral rolls in Karnataka. The CEOs are Anju Bishnon, Uttar Pradesh (in-charge of Bangalore revenue division); Alka Pandey, Orissa (Belgaum division); Naresh Gupta, Tamil Nadu (Gulbarga division) and Nalini Netto, Kerala (Mysore division).

The CEOs visited their respective divisions between December 6 and 10 and conducted preliminary rounds of verification of the rolls, said Ramaseshan.

He said 11 senior IAS officers of the State have also been entrusted supervision of the roll revision. The officers are:  Muniyappa, Sivashylam, Jayaramraje Urs, Lakshminarayan, Ashwath, Narayanaswamy, Parshwanath, Amita Prasad, Madan Gopal, Rajanish Goel. Another officer will be appointed later.

Ramaseshan said, “This is the first time that such an inspection is being conducted in Karnataka by the Election Commission. The revision of electoral rolls is the most essential work but that is the most neglected work too.

During every election, there are innumerable complaints regarding names missing from electoral rolls. There are 4.28 crore voters in the State and we have a mammoth task to make the rolls foolproof.”

Listing the reasons for voters’ names going missing, the CEO said that if field assessment (door-to-door survey of voters) is not done promptly, the rolls will not be perfect. In addition, voters too should take interest to check whether their names figure in the rolls or not.

Poor response

He said apathy of voters is a major problem. The OCEO had asked voters to submit their applications online from November 2 to 17 this year, for inclusion of their names in the rolls. This exercise was restricted to Bangalore.

Hardly 2,000 applications were received. “This indifference of Bangaloreans is making our job of revising the rolls tough. The problem is mainly limited to the capital. In a city like Bangalore, it is difficult to carry out the revision of rolls. People keep shifting their residence and new apartments keep coming up. So, our job to keep track of the voters also becomes difficult. If the names go missing, it becomes a fertile ground for political parties to indulge in ‘booth management,’ he said.

Ramaseshan said that a new system had been devised to scrutinise fresh inclusion of names but refused details. “We will not be including names randomly,” he added.