Election Commission to create social media cell for Haryana polls

In the run-up to the assembly elections scheduled for October this year, the state election commission will create a social media cell to monitor all election-related posts on various social media platforms.

The development was shared by the chief electoral officer of Haryana, Anurag Agarwal, on Monday during a meeting in the city with the deputy commissioners and election tehsildars of six districts that fall in the Gurugram and Faridabad divisions, namely Gurugram, Mewat, Faridabad, Palwal, Rewari, and Mahendragarh.

In the meeting, Agarwal reviewed the preparations for the upcoming assembly elections and said that the use of social media during elections had increased significantly which mandated that adequate attention was paid to it.

Agarwal said, “The election commission would put a special focus on social media activities and every election-related post on platforms, such as Twitter, Facebook, Whatsapp, Instagram and others, would be monitored through the social media cell which will operate out of the Chandigarh secretariat.”

He added that a senior officer would be appointed to take charge of the social media cell. During the review, the chief electoral officer also asked all the deputy commissioners to provide facilities in polling stations for differently-abled voters. He said that differently-abled voters could reach out to the administration through an app if they required transportation or wheel-chair facilities.

During the meeting, deputy commissioner Amit Khatri shared that the total number of voters in the district was 1,186,857, with the count of male and female voters in the district currently at 626,100 and 560,757 respectively.

Khatri also said that the election management plan for the district as well as individual booths had been prepared and sent to the state election commission.

First Published: Sep 03, 2019 06:29 IST