Karnataka: Voter ID applications getting rejected, probe ordered

BENGALURU: With less than three months left for the state elections, it has emerged that a large number of application forms for voter IDs in the city have been rejected without any valid reason. However, officials claim that rejections also occur due to citizens not following due procedure while applying for the IDs.

As per data obtained from the Additional District Election Officer (Central), about 28.18% of all online applications and 8.55% of manual applications received since the last elections have been rejected. The rejection rate for online applications are far higher, over 60% in as many as four constituencies. For online applications, Vijayanagar fares the worst with a rejection rate of 69.51%, while Mahalakshmi Layout fares the best with only 11 of the 1,029 applications rejected, a 1.07% rate.

On Tuesday, Karnataka Chief Electoral Officer Sanjiv Kumar visited the electoral office at Mahadevapura after receiving many complaints from residents. It was found that as of January 2018, 66.20% of the online applications had been rejected. Kumar ordered the officials to re-open all the rejected applications individually.

“As per the registration of electoral rules 1960, if anyone’s application is rejected, they have to be given a notice telling them the reason for it and also inform them a date and time to rectify the problem. This was not done,” said Anjali Saini, one of the founding members of Whitefield Rising. She said residents were also not given any acknowledgement of their applications, which Kumar ordered to be issued on the spot henceforth. This marked a success for residents who had been working towards this for almost three years, and had also filed a PIL in the High Court.

CITIZENS’ MOVEMENT ACROSS CITY

Organisations such as Million Voter Rising and Bangalore Apartment Federation have been trying to resolve issues related to Voter ID applications and spread awareness among citizens. “We have allotted one person for every constituency who is responsible to get people to apply for the ID. We have found that issues similar to those in Mahadevapura persist throughout the city,” said Sandhya Bhat, a member of BAF. Assistant election commissioner of BBMP Natesh G B said officials had taken many steps to increase the turnout of voters. “There are instances when electoral officials visited residences of citizens when they were not at home as they had gone for work, and ended up rejecting the application. But one wrong thing they did was to reject it without any notification,” he said. Natesh urged citizens to not only apply for the IDs, but also ensure their names appeared on the electoral rolls.