Over 1.28 lakh bogus voters removed from rolls

The first nine categories are from AP and the 10th category is of those voters who have duplicates across AP and Telangana. 
For representational purposes (Photo | ANI Twitter)
For representational purposes (Photo | ANI Twitter)

VIJAYAWADA: Acting on the complaint lodged by YSRC party about the presence of bogus/duplicate votes in electoral rolls of Andhra Pradesh, Chief Electoral Officer of Andhra Pradesh RP Sisodia initiated action and after a lengthy exercise found most of them to be genuine and 1,28,832 entries found to be duplicate, dead or migrated, were removed from the electoral rolls. 

In a press release issued on Friday, the CEO explained about the entire process of verification of the electoral rolls following the receipt of representation from former MLA of Dharmavaram K Venkatarami Reddy on November 5.

The former MLA, along with his representation complaining about the bogus voters, also furnished details of those doubtful electoral rolls in a 64 GB pen drive. The doubtful cases were classified into 10 categories. The first nine categories are from AP and the 10th category is of those voters who have duplicates across AP and Telangana. 

Sisodia said that after verification of the data provided by the petitioner, it was found that there were entries which were repeated many times in the list. The petitioner has treated each entry as a separate case and arrived at a figure of 52,67,636 entries. On closer scrutiny, it was found that only 25,47,019 entries were unique.

Subsequently, field verification was carried out. The photographs and records from the database available with Election Commission was taken into consideration and the data generated was sent to booth level officers for field verification. A software was developed for the generation of the list of such entries and for monitoring and tracking of the verification by the booth level officers (BLOs). Verification was carried out by conducting door-to-door campaign. 

After verification, correction was made in the electoral roll if the voter was found to be genuine, but some records were entered wrongly. These cases included all those cited by the petitioner in scenario number 4 (name same, gender different), 8 (invalid age), and 9 (invalid house numbers). 

A total number of 3,53,006 such entries were identified for correction and corrections were carried out in the electoral list by electoral registration officers. 

After field verification, most of the voters were found to be genuine, no correction or deletion of the entry was warranted. Hence these entries were retained. In all, 20,63,901 such entries were retained. 

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