The voter turnout of 74.26 per cent recorded during Monday’s polls should be considered as something above 80 per cent and it would have been so even officially if the Election Commission had weeded out voters possessing more than one EPIC with different residential addresses besides those who had migrated without deleting their names from the electoral rolls, say lawyers practising in the Madras High Court Bench here.
C. Sundaranathan (name changed), a native of a village falling under an Assembly Constituency in Dindigul district but working in a private concern here, says that he is eligible to vote in both places since he has two EPICs (Elector’s Photo Identity Card) — one containing the address of his ancestral home in the village where his parents live now and another containing his temporary residential address in Madurai North Assembly constituency.
“I had the option of voting either here or at my native place but I chose the latter and travelled all the way to Dindigul because my mother said that one political party had paid R. 1,000 for each of the three votes in our house and another paid Rs. 1,500 per vote apart from giving free dhotis and saris. She was apprehensive that the local politicians might demand the money and clothes back if I abstained from voting,” he says. A supervisor of a restaurant here states that he also has two EPICs with different addresses within the city limits. “Usually, I go to the polling station only after 4 p.m. So, even if someone else casts my vote in one constituency, I can always go to other and exercise my franchise,” he says nonchalantly. Stating that such duplicate entries in voters’ list is very common, advocate R. Gandhi says that cleaning up the list before elections would have displayed better results.
“People living in rented houses, those who take up jobs away from their home town and migrants do not bother to delete their names from the list before obtaining another EPIC in the new address. The projection of low voter turnout in Chennai is also mainly because of this reason because that is the city with a very high migrant population. Once multiple entries are removed, the total number of eligible voters would come down considerably and the official voting percentage would go up,” he points out.
Advocate I. Robert Chandrakumar says it is surprising to find multiple entries in the electoral rolls even in the era of computerisation. “The Election Commission should begin to clean up the rolls of multiple entries at least before the general elections scheduled in 2019,” he suggests.
