Bengaluru: Karnataka’s election authorities are now blending their electoral data with a national platform after being reluctant to join the national mainstream for a while now. But the move to port weeks before the election, which is being done as per the Election Commission of India’s (EC) directives, has raised concerns.
While all other states in
India were under the national unified platform known as Electoral Rolls Service NET (ERONET),
Karnataka had independently adopted Electoral Roll Management System (ERMS) for registering voters. The state-level platform was controlled by the office of the Chief Electoral Officer of Karnataka, whereas the national platform is handled by the EC.
Though the EC has been insisting that Karnataka migrate to ERONET like all other states for about a year, the state authority was not keen on doing it. The reason: ERMS is advanced and has features that ERONET lacks. Officials had often maintained that migrating to the national platform was regressive as it snatched people of the opportunity to use features such SMS alert soon after submitting voter registration form or when the form is rejected. But the EC wants all states to be under a single platform as it would help in tracking a voter’s movement from one state to another. The move not only helps in simultaneous inclusion and deletion of voters, but also in deduplication.