A couple residing in Nagole received a triple bonanza of sorts with three electoral photo identity cards each in hand just before poll day.
Electoral officials bestowed this unusual favour on Murali Mohan Rao Gurram and his wife Lakshmi Gurram, residents of Indraprastha Colony in Nagole.
Funnily however, Mr. Rao’s name varied in all three cards as ‘MOHAN RAO’, ‘mohan rao GURRAM’ and ‘MOHAN RAO GURRAM’, while his wife’s name appeared in two cards as ‘LAKSHMI GURRAM’, and as ‘lakshmi’ in the third one, with more variations in the husband’s name. All the three EPICs bore three different IDs for each of them.
Mr. Rao, a builder, has an explanation for how it might have happened. He says he had applied thrice during 15 days’ time, worried about his and his wife’s name getting deleted in the final rolls.
“I checked a month before elections, and our names were not there. We then gave our applications and Aadhaar card copies to the political party agents who visited our home offering to file applications on our behalf. After waiting for a few days and not hearing anything from them, we applied on our own again,” Mr. Rao says.
A third time, they applied during an enrolment drive in their colony, worried about not having received any confirmation from the authorities. All the three cards were delivered at once. “I applied with the same Aadhar number and address. How can they not check for duplication? What is the purpose of seeking Aadhar then,” questions Mr.Rao, bemused.
All or nothing
That aside, Mr.Rao also applied on behalf of four workers under him, who did not receive their EPICs and could not vote in the elections! The couple, however, exercised their franchise using only one EPIC.
Mr.Rao’s is not the only case where names were repeated in the electoral rolls. On Friday, the election day, more such duplications surfaced in the lists.
“My wife and I could not find our names in the list, but our daughter-in-law P.Geeta Lakshmi’s name was found in two booths of the same polling station,” says P. Krishna, a senior citizen from Lakshmingar area of Picket.
In another gaffe, the name of one Ganti Vijaya Shankara Murthy in L.B. Nagar constituency appeared twice in same polling station, with the same address, but two different ids.
One more voter Santhosh Gampa from Ramagundam constituency tweeted photos of his two voter slips with two different IDs to badminton star Jwala Gutta in response to her complaint that her name was missing from rolls.
