Karnataka polls: B.PAC submits suggestions to Chief Electoral Officer to improve voter registration

In the backdrop of Karnataka’s election authorities publishing the draft electoral roll on Wednesday, Bangalore Political Action Committee (B.PAC) which has taken up One Million New Votes campaign in Bengaluru, has submitted a set of suggestions before the Chief Electoral Officer - Karnataka to improve the voter enrollment process.
A team comrising B.PAC CEO Revathy Ashok, Rama from ELCIA and Suja from Infosys met CEO Karnataka Sanjeev Kumar and submitted their suggestions to encourage Voter Registration and Voter turnout in Bengaluru city. One of the suggestions placed before the election authority is to generate an SMS to the elector as soon as the Form 6 (for inclusion) is approved, and new EPIC is generated. “This information will help the voter to find his details and the polling station in the electoral rolls,” the B.PAC members said.

“In many cases, EROs demand an affidavit from citizens stating that they are not registered as voters or to get proof of deletion of their names from another constituency. This has led to poor register of willing citizens to register and participate in the voting. Even though they have mentioned in Declaration section (iv) or ANNEXURE-III of Form 6 they have rejected the application. When an application is rejected, please organise to send a notice to the citizen and allow him to appeal within 15 days. Though required by ECI rules, this is not practiced.,” the B.PAC has demanded the election authority.

Some of the other suggestions are: simplify online registration by eliminating the need to submit a hard copy of documents, setup voter facilitation camps at campuses and residence clusters in association with community organisations and publish accurate data of BLOs in the CEO website.