Complaining that there were “multiple problems” in the final voter list released by the Election Commission for the R.K. Nagar constituency, the DMK’s State IT wing secretary and MLA P.T.R. Palanivel Thiagarajan said there was scope for commotion on polling day, given the scale of last-minute deletions.
He told reporters here on Sunday that he would give a representation to the Chief Electoral Officer Rajesh Lakhoni to set right the anomalies at once. On a single day (December 4), the Election Commission had deleted roughly 18% of voters (approximately 48,000 voters) and released the final voter list. A booth-wise scrutiny has revealed discrepancies. Since an average of 180 voters from each booth have been summarily removed, there is a chance that at least some of them were genuine voters who should not have been removed, he said.
“When they had enough time to conduct the bypoll in R.K. Nagar after High Court’s intervention [since the earlier one was cancelled in the constituency], the official machinery could have ensured better compliance in the preparation of final voters list and avoided errors,” he noted.
