Voters have come back from the dead to get themselves deleted from the electoral rolls in Karnataka… or so it seems.
Thirty-seven people have submitted Form 7 applications seeking to delete their own names and citing death as the reason during the SIR in the state.
As many as 334 pairs of voters have submitted similar applications, declaring each other dead and requesting their removal from the rolls. These bizarre irregularities have surfaced at a time when protesters have taken to the streets to demand the resignation of chief election commissioner Gyanesh Kumar over the alleged doctoring of voter rolls.
Form 7 is used to object to the inclusion of a name or to request the deletion of an existing name from the rolls.
The discrepancies were spotted by an independent electoral intelligence and data consultancy company that parsed electoral data in Karnataka, Delhi, Maharashtra and Telangana.
According to the company, at least 25 districts in Karnataka have reported self-death and mutual death declarations. The highest number of mutual death declarations — where person A submitted Form 7 requesting the removal of person B from the rolls and vice versa — was from Belagavi, with 160 such cases. Kalaburagi followed with 80 such cases.
Election Commission officials in Karnataka attributed such anomalies to technical glitches or enumeration errors. However, there is no clarity on why booth-level officers tasked with scrutinising the forms did not detect the irregularities. The BLOs are supposed to issue a notice seeking an explanation in such cases.
The Karnataka draft roll has 4.46 crore voters. Around 43.82 lakh notices were generated for anomalies and non-mapping with the 2002 voter list.
Kharge concerns
Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge on Tuesday said he would explain to Prime Minister Narendra Modi his concerns over the SIR, delimitation and women’s reservation.
“I don’t want to talk about politics today. I have personally written a letter to the Prime Minister, and he has two letters from me,” Kharge told reporters in Kalaburagi. “I will explain everything to him tomorrow, including the harm caused by the SIR... the implications of the delimitation exercise they are undertaking, and the issue of reservation for women.”