Secunderabad Cantonment resident develops app to weed out duplicate voters

 Residents of Secunderabad Cantonment have been raising the issue of duplication of names in the voters list in their area since long.
Image for representational purpose only.
Image for representational purpose only.

HYDERABAD: Residents of Secunderabad Cantonment have been raising the issue of duplication of names in the voters list in their area since long. But when things did not change, one resident from Ward 4, Shravan Kumar, decided to take matters into his own hands. He has developed a mobile app which can be used to find such duplicate voters listed more than once in electoral rolls. Shravan says these discrepancies can then be reported to the concerned authorities. 

“I found out that there are multiple entries of a single voter with different serial numbers. In another instance, a voter had multiple entries with a different address, however, has the same husband/father’s name,” said Shravan. He stated that the app has been developed in a way that if one types a name in the search option, it will provide all similar-sounding names and their full details.  

“We embedded data of all the voters in ward 4 published by the SCB and of the 16,035 votes, 1,123 were duplicate voters. We have raised the issue with the SCB, who has asked us to identify these duplicate voters for each ward with the help of the app,” said Shravan. Another candidate from ward 5, T Arun Jyoti, has started a door-to-door campaign to identify these duplicate voters.

“We have accessed the voters list from SCB for ward 5, and we are re-checking each vote by going to every house. It is SCB’s job but we are forced to do it because they are not doing anything.” When asked about it, SCB vice-president J Ramakrishna said, “We are updating the list every year. Such duplicate voters might be less than five per cent of all voters and before elections, we will try to weed out all of them.”

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