Poll posters, banners, hoardings removed from Belagavi streets

Within minutes of the Election Commission of India announcing the poll dates for Karnataka, officers began clearing up the streets of posters, banners and hoardings put up by the government and political parties here on Tuesday.

By evening, most of them were down.

Deputy Commissioner and District Electoral Officer S. Ziyaullah said all such material will be removed by noon on Wednesday. Officials have been preparing for the elections in several other ways. Officials have been trained at state, district and taluk levels. Technical teams and national informatics centre officials have been training electronic voting machine handlers.

This time’s technical training sessions are special because of the use of Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail machines, along with the ballot units and control units. Four rounds of training have been conducted for officials in the use of these units.

A few minutes after the announcement in New Delhi, Mr. Ziyaullah gave details of the preparations in the district. He told presspersons that the district has 36,57, 541 voters, including 18,54,485 men, 1,80,356 women and 266 third gender voters. They will vote in 4,414 booths in 18 Assembly constituencies in 14 taluks spread over three Lok Sabha constituencies. Each booth will have disabled friendly features like ramps, power and water supply and a toilet nearby.

An army of 27,760 officers will conduct the polls. They will include five personnel per booth, and members of 62 static surveillance squads and 82 mobile squads and 58 check posts.

Each Assembly constituency has a nodal officer who will receive nominations, scrutinise them and oversee polling and counting. These officers have powers of executive magistrates and can initiate legal action against offenders under IPC, CrPC and Representation of the People Act.

Separate sets of officials will oversee expenditure of candidates and implement the code of conduct. All actions like campaigning without permission will be stopped by these officials. Cases will be booked and action will be taken, the DC said. Each candidate can spend up to Rs. 28 lakh for his election, of which only Rs. 20,000 in cash.

Each candidate shall open a new bank account on the day of his nomination and conduct all his poll transactions from there. Common people can carry upto Rs. 50,000 without documents and higher amounts with proper documents. Mega events like marriages, jatras, and other functions have to be intimated to the election duty officers.

After Bengaluru, Belagavi has the largest number of Assembly seats at 18. “We have urged the State government to provide an additional district electoral officer. If our request is conceded, we will divide our responsibilities between Belagavi and Chikkodi Lok Sabha constituencies,” the DC said.

A 24 hour helpline has been set up in the DEO office. People can report violations or seek information about elections by dialling 0831-2565555.

All advertisements, in print, electronic or social media should be pre approved by the district level media monitoring committee.