Karnataka poll officials sought deletions of 61,000 voters without citing reasons: ‘The Hindu’
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Election officials filed 61,059 Form 7 applications seeking to remove voters from Karnataka’s electoral rolls without stating any reason during the special intensive revision, The Hindu reported on Monday.
The 1960 Registration of Electors Rules mandate that an application to delete voters should be rejected if it does not state the reason for the request.
In the case of Karnataka, electoral registration officers and assistant electoral registration officers said that the system “auto-generated” these forms and added their digital signatures when voters could not be reached during hearings of notices issued for no mapping or “logical discrepancies”, reported The Hindu.
In such cases, voters were marked as “ineligible”.
“Logical discrepancies” flagged by the poll panel during the voter list revision included mismatches in parents’ names, low age gap with parents and the number of children of the parents being above six.
The officials said that they had been instructed to file Form 7 applications if a voter had moved, had a duplicate entry elsewhere, was underage, had died or was not an Indian citizen, The Hindu reported. However, since the forms were auto-generated, the reason for seeking deletion was left blank.
The names of more than one crore voters were removed from Karnataka’s draft list published on August 24 as part of special intensive revision. The excluded names account for 19.4% of the state’s electorate,...