Alive citizens dead in voters’ list !

Mysore/Mysuru: Clean and error-free voter lists have not been achieved even after 75 years of Independence and the classic problem of ‘ghosts’ (dead person being mentioned alive), alive persons mentioned as dead and a lot of duplicate names pervade most large voter databases. 

Voter lists are revised and prepared after spending crores of rupees periodically but still they are full of anomalies, leaving a lot of scope for fake voting. Lack of coordination between City Corporation and Revenue officials — responsible for issuing Death Certificates in urban and rural areas respectively — and the offices of Election Commission is said to be the reason behind the present anomaly in voters’ list. 

Narrating his shocking experience of being declared as a dead person, Krishnamoorthi Bhat, a resident of Old Wood Yard Road at Hosabandikeri told Star of Mysore that on  Sept. 25, two ladies visited his house and told him that they had come from Gopalaswamy Primary School and have been entrusted with the task of updating voters’ list by Mysuru City Corporation (MCC). 

“They showed me a memorandum from the Corporation mentioning the person by name Krishnamoorthi Bhat (that’s me) has expired and they had come here to check and update the list. I was shocked and told them that I was Krishnamoorthi Bhat and I was standing in front of them,” he said.  

“I questioned the ladies who declared me dead and I told them that I had voted in the previous election too and how can a Corporation issue a memorandum that I am dead,” he said. The ladies replied that they had come from the MCC to check the voters’ list. “I hope all anomalies like living people being declared dead and dead people finding their names in the list will be rectified by the next elections,” he added. 

The root of this problem lies in how the Election Commission (EC) ensures voters are added just once to the list and how a voter that is deleted is not misused for a fake vote. 

According to people in the know of things, the problem can be solved with a simple solution that is readily —­ Aadhaar. All Indian residents today possess an Aadhaar number that is guaranteed to be unique, thanks to its biometric identification. When the EC performs its function of checking for eligibility of a new voter and decides to add the person to the voters’ list, that person’s Aadhaar number can serve as a second-factor authentication of uniqueness, they explained. 

Aadhaar has the ability to act as a second-factor check to remove duplicates and ghosts within the Election Commission database and this is a valid way of doing so. Voters are subjected to verification in the run-up to the elections by Booth-Level Officers (BLOs).

The BLOs will enquire and mark voters in three categories: Absent (A) – for those who do not stay in the area for the most part of the year, Shifted (S) – for those who have shifted out of the address on the electoral list, and Dead (D). 

Names are excluded in the voters’ list only if the person submits the application in Form 7 format. It is not possible to declare a person dead if that person is alive. I will ask the Election Wing Officers to check such cases and identify when and how such errors have crept into the voters’ list. Our Officers are already on the job of revising the voters list and when they come to houses, the residents must give authentic information and co-operate with us to rectify the errors, said G. Lakshmikantha Reddy, Commissioner, Mysuru City Corporation.