The State election authority, the office of the Chief Electoral Officer, appears to have landed in a piquant situation after taking up revision of electoral rolls.
The reason: several instances of presence of hundreds of votes in a single house have come up as a part of the verification process. The development assumes significance as the Telugu Desam Party has recently submitted a representation comprising details of the individual houses which have few hundreds of voters.
According to the representation submitted by the TDP, there are five houses in Malakpet constituency with 694 voters listed in them while 440 voters were registered from three houses in the same constituency. The gravity of the situation can be gauged from the fact that officials of the CEO’s office themselves were admitting that there was a huge mismatch in the electors population ration. “There are polling stations where there are 1006 voters for every 1,000 population,” a senior official told The Hindu.
Erroneous entries
The discrepancy, according to officials, crept in during the summary revision of electoral rolls taken up in 2015 and 2016 when the CEO’s office was not bifurcated between the successor States of Telangana and Andhra Pradesh.
They attribute the shortcoming to the manner in which the revision of electoral rolls was carried out under the undivided CEO’s office. Tabs were provided to the district and mandal level officers, but data entry operators had to be appointed exclusively as the officers concerned were not familiar with operation of tabs. This has in turn resulted in errors in the entries leading to the present state of affairs.
Officials realised the discrepancy after the deployment of the ERO Net, the platform created by the Election Commission for hosting data of voters across the country, which popped up matches under similar addresses.
The analytical tools incorporated in the ERO Net software enabled the officials concerned to weed out majority of such entries and bring the elector population ratio to less 700:1,000. “There are still some left and we are capable of removing them before the October 5 deadline,” the official said.