Elections, both state and central, are drawing near and the people are
gearing themselves to vote once again. But the government is making it
as difficult as possible for the people to exercise their right to vote.
Here are just a few problems voters are facing:
1. To find out if you are a registered voter is just about
impossible. To find out if your name is still on the voters list, the
officials tell you to go to the polling booth you went to vote in the
last election, but when you go to that booth, you will find that not all
booths have the information. You have to check a few booths (which are
mostly primary schools) in the neighbourhood before you find the booth
with the information. Even if you locate the correct booth, the teacher
who has been entrusted with the job is not generally available during
working hours. When you finally meet the right person, it is still
difficult to find the needed information. The voters list they have is
not well-organized and also incomplete and they have difficulty in
finding your name in it. Since they have only one copy of the list, they
are unwilling to give it to you and so you can not go through it
methodically either.
If you decide that instead of all this hard work, you will sit
at home and use the internet to find your name in the voters list, your
situation is not much better. The Karnataka Election Commission's website does not give the voters list, but offers to search for your name in the list. It fails to do so very often. The website infobytes.in gives you voters lists, but they are outdated and very difficult to
locate names, since there is no discernible order to the entries and the
names are not indexed.
2. The names of many voters who have a voter's ID and who voted in
the last election have found their names missing from the voters list.
How can this happen? Who is responsible?
3. If you see the voters list of your street, you will find dozens
of strange names, people you have never met and people you are sure do
not live in your neighborhood. Once in a while, officials come to check,
but these names mysteriously continue to be present in the voters list,
while the names of people who actually live in your neighbourhood are
deleted for not living in the address shown! More surprisingly, in the
same family which stays at the same address, some names continue as
valid while others have been deleted.
4. Voters have also been transferred on a large scale to new booths
without any logic. Some of the new booths are nearby but some are far
from the present booth. For example, I live with my wife, my son and
daughter-in-law in J.P.Nagar. We all voted in booth no. 169 in J.P.Nagar
in the last election. But now, in the new voters list, my wife and I
continue to be at booth no. 169 while the names of my son and
daughter-in-law have been moved to booth no. 160 in Srirampura which is 3
km from our house. Shifting of names from booth no. 169 to 160 seems to
have happened to more than two hundred people of Main Roads 17-20 of
J.P.Nagar. Why has this happened? How can one expect people, especially
senior citizens, to go so far to vote?
5. Many names, addresses, ages, names of husband/father and gender
listed in the voters list are incorrect. I have thus far given 9
applications for corrections to the voters list information of my family
and have obtained acknowledgments for them. But till now, none of the
mistakes have been rectified. At least I am better off than some people I
know who have submitted such applications. When they point out an error
in the name, the error is corrected, but a new error in the address is
introduced. When they submit another application for the correction in
address, the address gets corrected, but the age which was correct
earlier is now changed. The authorities seem determined to keep the
number of errors constant. Or maybe they are keeping them as a "beauty
spot"!
Also, for every correction, however minor, you have to submit a
passport size photo, or they will not accept your application. The
application form is so complicated that a person with average education
will not be able to complete it correctly.
6. The old voter ID cards of many of us had numbers which started
with KT. But the government has announced that these have been changed
to numbers beginning with SLC. We are now wondering if the officials are
familiar with the change and if their voter IDs will be rejected at the
time of voting.
It appears that there is no supervision and no accountability
for the officials and staff handling voters lists as well as the private
agencies they hire. Officials say that it is the responsibility of the
citizens to check if their names are in the voter lists and reregister
if the names are missing. But who has the time, effort or money to do
this every time? Instead of making it easy for the voters to exercise
their civic right, officials are doing everything to make it difficult.
Some people whose names are missing from the voters list have already
given up the fight and are not reregistering. They will not vote in the
next election. If this trend continues, more and more people will stop
voting and democracy in our country will be dead.
G.L.Nagaraj Urs, Mysore Grahakara Parishat