The Chittoor district machinery is gearing up for the forthcoming general elections that will cover three parliamentary constituencies (Tirupati, Chittoor and Rajampeta) and 14 assembly constituencies spread across 66 mandals in the district.
Compared to previous elections, the electoral rolls have seen a rise of 5% with inclusion of new voters. There will be 3,800 polling centres in the district, with the projected number of voters at the time of readying the voters’ list estimated to be 30,25,222. Women voters outnumber men at 15,21,401.
Awareness campaign
District Collector P.S. Pradyumna said that all the complaints and allegations would be taken into account and viewed with seriousness. "The tahsildars in all mandals have been instructed to give top priority to complaints and rectify the discrepancies. All the claims would be solved by February 20. Any officials found to be showing partiality would be dealt with sternly," the Collector said.
The Collector said that in order to achieve 90% polling in the district, a special awareness campaign is under way christened ‘Vote Chittoor Vote’. He said that special focus was being laid to weed out instances of voters’ names getting repeated in areas bordering other States. Speeding up the election process, the first level of VVPATs checking was completed, with February 18 being the deadline for inspection of the EVMs.
Tension brews
There were sporadic complaints levelled by the opposition YSRCP in the western mandals, where the party enjoys a strong presence with five MLAs out of eight, that the ruling TDP was employing strong-arm tactics to manipulate the district machinery and influence voters through unscrupulous means.
However, it was only the Chandragiri assembly constituency (represented by YSRCP’s Chevireddy Bhaskar Reddy) which saw serious allegations of voters being struck off the electoral lists. The MLA staged protests at the local police stations in the constituency and held press meets demanding justice. For over a fortnight, the YSRCP MLA and his rival – TDP district president Pulivarthy Nani – had locked horns over the issue. The TDP cadres allege that Mr. Bhaskar Reddy resorted to unfair means by gifting voters with goodies like wall clocks and mobile phones. Some TDP cadres even produced some wall clocks bearing the MLA’s image to bolster their allegations.
