How difficult can it be to get your name on the electoral rolls? At Mahadevapura, nearly 1,600 residents — most of whom work in the IT sector — have been trying to get their names enrolled since 2015 with little success. This gave rise to the Million Voter Rising campaign, with many volunteers suspecting that there was a deliberate attempt “to keep them out”.
Following The Hindu bringing to the fore the issues faced by these applicants, BBMP Commissioner N. Manjunath Prasad, who is also the Chief Returning Officer for the city, said he had ordered a probe by the Joint Commissioner, Mahadevapura, into the “fiasco”. “I will get a report in two weeks and take suitable action based on the findings,” said Mr. Prasad, and added that any bias or harassment of applicants who wish to be included in the electoral rolls was a serious offence.
Anil Kumar Jha, Chief Electoral Officer, Karnataka, said he had received complaints of the voter registration issues in Mahadevapura earlier and had asked the BBMP Commissioner to address the problems. “Volunteers from Million Voter Rising have met me over this. I have issued directions to the officials concerned. We will work towards helping citizens to exercise their franchise,” he said.
Senior officials of the Election Commission of India said working with local civic officials, a statutory requirement for voter enrolment, had led to a lot of gaps. “Civic officials are also burdened with civic work and tax collection, which has tied our hands as well when it comes to forcing them to give top priority for electoral work. In two cases earlier, we have even ensured punitive action against officials for such lapses. But we can’t get everybody suspended,” said an ECI official who wanted his name to be withheld.
Untangling reasons for delay in voter registration
Is there an answer to why nearly 1,600 online voter registration applications submitted by residents of upscale pockets of Mahadevapura have been pending for nearly six months, despite the matter being escalated to the Chief Election Officer of the State multiple times? With officials and residents citing conflicting reasons for this delay, The Hindu looks at some of the problems and how they can be worked out.
Access issue
Local civic officials have to enrol citizens within 30 days of them submitting applications. Kemparangaiah, Revenue Officer and Election Returning Officer (Mahadevapura), said the biggest hurdle was that apartments and gated communities do not let the Block-level Officer (BLO) in for verification.
Responding to this, Million Voters Rising, organised camps at these communities following which at least a hundred online applications were made. Visiting BBMP officials and BLOs accepted the signed hard copies of the online applications and verified the residential address of the applicants. From February, 27 such camps were held, even as over 10,718 residents have expressed interest to be enrolled.
However, it is not a solution. “Election Commission of India bans receiving bulk applications. Following these camps, local politicians have been forcing us to accept bulk manual applications they submit, and when we reject them, they point out to the camps at apartments. It’s an arduous task to balance the two,” said a revenue official, indicating the animosity between the local politicians and those enrolling through residents’ welfare associations.
It should be noted though that the camps at apartments are not mass application submission camps, but mass verification camps after each applicant has made an online application, said Anil Kumar Jha, Chief Electoral Officer, Karnataka.
The ‘bug’
Though a citizen makes an online application to register as a voter, he/she has to submit a signed hard copy of the application at the local ward office within seven days. The ECI stipulates a 30-day deadline from the date of receiving the hard copy for enrolment. Between the receipt of the hard copy of the application and enrolment there are three more steps: onground verification by the BLO, the Returning Officer deciding whether the applicant is eligible for enrolment or not, and allotment of part number.
Applicants in Mahadevapura have been facing a peculiar problem. Following an online application and submission of the hard copy, local civic officials refuse to either issue an acknowledgement for the hard copy or update the status of the application on the ECI software indicating the receipt of the hard copy. “This essentially has kept thousands of applications unacknowledged or their progress not updated on the system, keeping both the ECI and the applicants in the dark. This makes it impossible to monitor the 30-day deadline for processing an application,” said Anjali Saini, a volunteer leading the Million Voter Rising campaign. “The unacknowledged hard copies have also gone missing mysteriously like in 2015. This was also the case for over 500 applications from Bellandur.”
But why don’t the civic officials update the progress of an application on the ECI software? Kemparangaiah, RO (Mahadevapura), has been telling volunteers from Million Voter Rising and The Hindu as well that the ECI software has a bug that does not let them update the progress of an application till the entire process is completed. Mr. Kemparangaiah, along with several other civic officials in the area, said the five-step checklist of progress of an application has to be verified together for the software to recognise the applications. In other words, the five steps are not recognised as sequential individual steps by the software.
However, when the The Hindu approached the ECI, it was learnt that this was a misinformation campaign by the local civic officials and the bug was non-existent. The software is, in fact, designed to update the sequential five-step process as each application progresses from one step to the next. K.N. Ramesh, Joint CEO (Technical), Karnataka, who demonstrated the software to The Hindu, said the software was working fine for seven years now and it was the first time he had heard of such a complaint.
(In the third and final part of the series, we look at how conscious efforts have been made to keep people out of particpatory governance.)