The Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) plans to ‘sanitise’ the electoral rolls before the civic body elections scheduled towards the year-end having learnt lessons during the conduct of elections for Parliament and Assembly constituencies.
There have been several complaints about the names of voters missing from the electoral rolls and also allegations about names figuring in more than one place during the polls held last week.
A door-to-door survey to verify the electoral rolls and a series of measures such as checking the rolls for duplication using special software were among the possible ideas that would be considered, said an official. “We will have to consider the option of using the ‘de-duplication’ software that helps in weeding out who figure more than once in the electoral rolls,” he said. For this software, the Chief Electoral Officer (CEO) would have to be approached for clearance to obtain and use it. If the GHMC Commissioner, Somesh Kumar, gives a nod to the idea, the process would be put in place well in advance for the civic body polls expected to be conducted around November , he said.
The software helps in running through the data related to electoral rolls and identifying presence of a voter in more than one instance, the official explained. “It has two facilities, one is ‘exact’ where photographs are matched and second is ‘non-exact’ where details such as name, father’s name are matched,” he said. If the presence of a voter is found in two different locations, then the staff would have to visit both the places and check them out.
It was pointed out that in most cases, a voter when he shifts from one location to another, goes ahead and gets his details added there in the rolls. “However, they do not get the same deleted from the place they are shifting from which creates confusion in the data available with us,” the officer said.
