GP polls: Errors continue to manifest in voter-lists in DK

Mangaluru, May 18: Despite supervision of senior officials while preparing the electoral rolls, errors such as omission of names, duplication of names and inclusion of names of deceased are becoming a very common phenomenon in the voter lists.

For the Gram Panchayat elections to be held next week in many districts of Karnataka, the voters lists of 1,108 wards under 227 gram panchayats in Dakshina Kannada have already been released.

To their dismay, several citizens have found the names of deceased family members in the voters list, in spite of having submitted applications for their deletion.

In other wards, people have found duplication of their names, while others have found their names missing from the list - all of which could directly affect the percentile results in the district.

For the impending elections, the wards in each gram panchayat have been divided on the basis of the population, according to which it was found in several places that adjacent neighbours belong to different wards and have to vote for different set of candidates.

Few other errors such as wrongly spelt names and several families having the same house number were also manifested in the voters list in some of the wards.

The errors in the voters list have caused trouble and grief to some of the voters. A 40-year-old electorate said that his father had passed away two years ago, but despite submitting an application during the Lok Sabha elections to delete his name, it was still present in the voters list. This has brought grief and sorrow to my family, he said.

Former gram panchayat member Mohammed Naseer said that there had been several errors in the voters list during the Lok Sabha elections such as inclusion of names of deceased or relocated persons, omission of eligible voters, duplication of names and wrongly typed names.

The concerned block level officers (BLO) had been informed of the errors so that they could be rectified. However, the errors still exist in the voters list. Only when the errors have been rectified, the voters list will have significance in the elections, he complained.

Dakshina Kannada Deputy Commissioner A B Ibrahim said that the errors in the voters list had been made due to the negligence of the BLOs. The inclusion of names of deceased in the revised voters list is inexcusable, he said.