First time voters in Virudhunagar district who were not used to ballot papers were a bit anxious as they were asked to cast not one but four votes at a time, for the four posts of rural local bodies.
“This is something new for me, as I have cast my vote only once in the past that too using electronic voting machine,” said K. Bhuvaneswari, 20, a final-year commerce student at a polling booth in Krishnankoil. She said that first time she had voted in the Parliament election in 2019. “It was all about pressing of one of the buttons (in the ballot unit of the EVMs),” she said.
The rural voters have to cast votes four votes each – one each for the post of panchayat ward member, village panchayat president, panchayat union ward member and district panchayat ward member. “I was perplexed looking at different colours of the ballot papers,” said another first-time voter for local bodies, Jakkammal, 20, at Alangulam. It took some time for her to go through each of the papers in white, pink, green and yellow to identify which paper was for which post.
“I was nervous, but finally managed to vote,” she said. When asked as to whether she had chosen the right candidate in her mind, she said “yes” with a chuckle.
S. Srinivasan, 20, a third-year engineering student, said that he too was confused with the four votes to be cast. “In my first attempt I had to cast two votes - one for Sattur Assembly (by-election) and one for Virudhunagar Lok Sabha constituency - but using EVMs,” he said. However, he said he could overcome the anxiety very soon, because his father himself was a candidate for the panchayat ward member.
“ Candidates of my choice for others posts were my relatives or people known to me. Hence, it was easy for me,” he said.
Only thumb impressions
Meanwhile, in one of the booths at a school in Alangulam, the polling officials preferred to take left thumb impressions on the counterfoils of all the four ballot papers instead of giving the voters the choice to sign or to leave thumb impressions.
“It was only a strategy to speed up the voting process. We have more than 1,000 votes in our booth and only little over 580 had voted till 4 p.m. So we requested the voters to use thumb impression as it was faster,” he said.
So among those who left thumb impressions were all educated and students.
“Many voters took lot of time to sign the papers. Since they had to sign four times, the process was getting delayed and the queue was growing,” another polling official said.
Going out of the way
Meanwhile, in one of the polling booths in Srivilliputtur panchayat union, the polling officials came out of the booth to the verandah to take thumb impressions of two aged persons, who could not walk.
“Since, there was no wheel-chair, we found this easy. This was possible because no agents objected to this,” said one of the agents.
