Election Commission Shifts to Overdrive

Chennai: with just two weeks left for polling in the State for the Lok Sabha elections, officials involved in the conduct of the elections are leaving no stone unturned to make the process incident free and have identified 181 critical polling stations all over the State that might need the deployment of more security forces.

Besides the 181 polling stations identified as ‘critical,’ the election commission has also found 8050 polling stations to be ‘vulnerable’ and have initiated measures to prevent any untoward incidents in those places, too.

Those constituencies that have no ‘critical’ booth are South Chennai, Central Chennai, Sriperumbudur, Kanchipuram, Vellore, Namakkal, Erode, Tiruppur, Nilgiris, Coimbatore, Pollachi, Trichy, Mayiladuthurai, Nagapattinam, Thanjavur, Theni, Virudhunagar and Kanyakumari, while Dindigul tops the list with 39 booths.

The highest number of vulnerable booths are in Madurai constituency (511) and the least number of vulnerable booths are in Perambalur (55).

Already 39 general observers, 20 police observers, and 58 expenditure observers are in the field, monitoring the campaigns and other work carried out by the political parties, while the State would have 190 companies of the Central Armed Police Force in total.

Complaints on Model Code of Conduct violations, received through the C Vigil app are processed immediately and appropriate action taken. Till April 3, the number of complaints received stood at 2337. Of them only 11 are pending as 219 were dropped and 1827 of them were disposed of by the officials.

Meanwhile, the government declared a holiday on April 19, the day of polling in the State, under the Negotiable Instruments Act. Already the government has urged the private sector to declare a holiday on that day to enable their employees to exercise their franchise.