HAVERI: All parties are striving to curb invalid votes on Wednesday’s council polls. The West Graduates constituency alone had reported 7,823 invalid votes in 2014, higher than the votes garnered by a national party candidate.
BJP, Congress and JD(S) leaders are conducting workshops for their workers to guide voters on how to cast votes in preferential polling. Most of the votes were invalid as the voters put a tick mark beside the candidate they supported instead of enumerating their preferences.
Haveri ZP CEO and West Graduate constituency SVEEP chairman Ramesh Desai said, “Despite the SCEEP programme, invalid votes had been reported in many elections involving preferential polling. The candidates should have created awareness among voters.”
“More than 50% of votes polled during the previous in the constituency were invalid. Now we are creating awareness among voters. Election experts in our party have been advising how to mark preferential votes on the ballot papers during campaigning,” said Haveri BJP president Siddaraj Kalkoti.
Haveri district Congress unit president MM Hiremath said, “All the registered voters are graduates and they can understand how to mark their votes on a ballot paper. But we are unable to understand how the number of invalid votes were higher than what our candidate had polled. Our workers have been creating awareness on social media as well and we hope the number of invalid votes will reduce in this election.”