The Madras High Court on Wednesday agreed to hear on Thursday a plea made by the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam to reopen a writ petition, which was disposed of as infructuous on November 21 after recording the submission of Greater Chennai Corporation Commissioner that names of 45,819 voters had been deleted from electoral rolls of RK Nagar Assembly constituency, scheduled to go for bypoll on December 21.
Chief Justice Indira Banerjee acceded to a request made by Senior Counsel P. Wilson and directed the High Court Registry to list the plea for hearing on Thursday. The direction was issued after the counsel accused the Election Commission of having made a “wrong statement” in the court with respect to amendments made to the electoral rolls, and claimed that more than 5,000 “bogus voters” were yet to be weeded out.
In its writ petition, the DMK, represented by its organising secretary R.S. Bharathi, had sought to restrain the Election Commission from conducting the bypoll for R.K. Nagar constituency without purifying the voters list. He wanted correction of anomalies such as multiple entries of same names and existence of names of voters who had migrated to other constituencies as well as those who had died long back.
Though the party claimed that there were 44,999 such entries that had to be deleted from the voters list, the Election Commission on November 21 produced a copy of an official communication in the court stating that as many as 45,819 names had been deleted. The communication had actually been sent by Greater Chennai Corporation Commissioner, in his capacity as District Election Officer.
“This [deletion] has been done after 100% field verification by 256 booth level officers, further super checked by 25 supervisors and cursory verification by the Assistant Electoral Registration Officer and the Electoral Registration Officer of Dr. Radhakrishnan Nagar Assembly constituency. The large-scale deletion occurred due to frequent migration of urban public and dead electors,” the communication read.
Since the break-up showed that 38,319 voters had shifted their residence out of R.K. Nagar constituency, 3,818 had died and 3,682 were double entries, the judges recorded the details in their order and disposed of the writ petition as infructuous. However, now, the DMK claimed that a cross verification done by its party cadre showed that more than 5,000 “bogus voters” continued to be on the electoral rolls of the constituency.
