Every Assembly constituency in Andhra Pradesh will have a model polling station, wherein one can just drive down, park his or her vehicle, cast the vote and be done with the entire process in just a couple of minutes, said Chief Electoral Officer Bhanwar Lal.
He was speaking reviewing the progress of SVEEP (Systematic Voters’ Education and Electoral Participation) programme of all 23 districts in the State.
Speaking to The Hindu , he said the model polling station was an initiative from the Chief Election Commissioner and was intended to attract the voters from the affluent segment of society who avoid casting their franchise for various reasons such as lack of vehicle parking and standing in long queues.
“The polling station will have all facilities to see that the entire process is over in a couple minutes in a good ambience. It is just the beginning and we aim to convert all polling stations to model stations in phases,” he said. In AP, there are 294 constituencies, and each will have a model station and the location will depend on the demographic profile.
On the status of electoral photo identity card (EPIC), Mr. Bhanwar Lal said AP had achieved 100 per cent status.
According to him, AP will have about 6.42 crores voters for this election, who will be casting their votes across 69,014 polling stations across the states in two phases and each station will be manned by 15 persons including the security personnel. In total about 10,35,000 officials will be engaged in election duty.
As part of the programme, District Collectors or District Electoral Officers are supposed to use all means under their purview such as folk artistes, opinion leaders, besides conducting rallies, road shows and extensive use of the electronic communication system to educate voters.
Mr. Lal sounded confident that SVEEP will increase the last election average of voter turnout of 72 per cent to at least 85 per cent in this election.
Earlier, Kamini Chauhan Ratan, who was part of the SVEEP implementation at Bulandshahr, gave a power point presentation through video conferencing, on how it was implemented and the success story.
