At least 40 people in the latest voter list in Bengaluru are aged 120 or more, as per an analysis by a retired naval officer, P G Bhat, who has developed a software to document errors in electoral rolls.
This and other glaring errors abound in the voter list. There are wrong entries, duplication of voter identity cards, wrong gender, interchanged photographs and mismatched data.
But in what could be a potentially huge mistake, the names of 99 per cent of eligible voters who have registered themselves since February 2015 have not been included in the list. Bhat said he had written to the State Election Commission (SEC), the Chief Electoral Officer (CEO) and the BBMP commissioner about the matter but to no avail.
“On August 17, over five lakh registration requests were approved and added to the CEO’s voter database but not included in the BBMP electoral rolls. Similarly, about 60,000 requests for deletion were approved and deleted from CEO’s voter database, but continued to appear in the SEC database,” he told Deccan Herald.
Poor co-ordination between various agencies is to blame for these errors which could repel voters, affecting the turnout on the polling day, Bhat said. “(The) staff maintaining the electoral rolls and helping in the conduct of elections are the same for the CEO and the SEC. When new registrations, deletions, or corrections are made to voter lists, they are updated in the CEO’s repository. If the SEC does not synchronise his repository with that of the CEO, data completeness suffers. Voters querying at the SEC website would be confused and frustrated,” he writes on his blog.
While there ought to be a pooling booth for 1,400 voters, at least 25 per cent centres have close to 2,000 voters, he said.