State Election Commission orders voter roll checking after citizens detect goof up

The English language voter rolls for several polling booths were found to be complete replications of entries from other booths, Smart Vote found out.

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The State Election Commission (SEC) has written to the BBMP asking the Assistant Revenue Officers (ARO) to verify the voter lists of their respective wards. This comes a day after a Bangalore-based citizens group on voter awareness, Smart Vote, approached the SEC about errors in 19 polling booths. Smart Vote found that the electoral lists of three polling booths have been duplicated, in what seems to be a human error and not that of the database itself. These have been fixed by the SEC. But there are more such duplications and the SEC says they are looking into it.

For example, the voters list of polling booth number 21 under Bommanahalli (Ward 175) has been duplicated for polling booths 22, 23 and 24.

However, the SEC has found that the errors are only with the English rolls and not the Kannada ones. Also, the supplementary rolls of each of these voter lists in English have been found to be updated correctly.

Secretary of the SEC, D K Ravindranath says that errors are being checked and have sought a report from the AROs of the BBMP. "It'll take reasonable time, three to four days. If we don't get a report then we'll give them a deadline", he says.