Election Commission begins audit of electoral rolls for flaws

Hyderabad: The Election Commission of India is conducting an audit of electoral rolls following allegations that there were 16 per cent of names of voters were either invalid or duplicate.

Separately, the AP High Court is hearing a public interest litigationon the matter.

A seperate analysis done by election watch agencies has revealed that there are 25 lakh duplicate votes where the names of the voter, father or husband are the same.

YSRC president Y.S. Jagan Mohan Reddy has alleged that out of the 3.69 crore voters in AP, the names of over 59 lakh, or 16 per cent, are invalid or duplicate. He had met Chief Election Commissioner Sunil Arora on February 4 and told him that that the TD government was manipulating voter rolls to undermine the electoral process.

Following this, the Election Commission is verifying the allegations. It is said that at least 20 lakh voters have their names on the electoral rolls in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana s tate.

A 10-member team headed by former deputy election commissioner Vinod Zutshi was in AP  from February 20 to conduct an audit of electoral rolls. Local election officials issued notices to the voters in cities like Vizag, Guntur, Vijayawada, Rajahmundry and Tirupati.

The process gained significance as the AP High Court on Wednesday asked the EC to explain the irregularities following a public interest litigation filed in the court by advocate Ponnavolu Sudhakar Reddy.

It has been alleged that there bogus, duplicate and demographical similar entries that would come up to 59 lakh suspicious votes.

In September last year, the Opposition parties had alleged that there were 52 lakh duplicate votes. The number has now been increased to 59 lakh.

Around 4.5 lakh names are found to have the same father/husband name and age but a different house number.  In around 1.7 lakh votes, the voter;’s name was interchanged like, for instance, Subba Rao and Rao Subba.

Another 2.36 lakh names were pronounced in a similar manner but with the alteration of one or two characters. For 3,307 names, the age is mentioned as either below 18 years or more than 100 years. At least 2.15 lakh houses have invalid house numbers and 78,156 votes are where all the details are same, according to independent analysis.

AP Chief Electoral Officer Gopalakrishna Dwievedi said that in order to conduct elections in a transparent manner all demographically similar votes will be deleted after a through the process.  Three inspection teams have been formed, he said.