Amid the ongoing row over the functioning of the Election Commission, Maharashtra’s Chief Electoral Officer (CEO) has written to the poll panel seeking four changes in the ECINet software in the notice phase of the SIR.
The CEO has echoed the demands earlier made by the two Election Commissioners regarding ECINet and the role of EROs, as reported by The Indian Express last week.
Maharashtra is currently in the notice phase of the SIR.
CEO S Chockalingam, NDTV has learnt, has written to the EC seeking greater discretion for Electoral Registration Officers (EROs) in handling cases in the notice phase. The CEO has demanded that EROs be allowed to decide cases involving “logical discrepancies” after conducting a hearing.
The same demand for greater discretion for EROs had earlier been flagged by the two Election Commissioners – Vivek Joshi and Sukhbir Singh Sandhu.
The “logical discrepancy” cases are those where the Commission’s ECINet software throws up an issue when it tries to link an elector to a parent or grandparent on the roll from the last SIR, such as a parent’s name that doesn’t match or age issues. It is not a finding that someone is not a voter. It is a mismatch.
The Maharashtra CEO has demanded changes in the software that would give EROs more options while processing SIR notices. The law assigns responsibility for the electoral roll to the Electoral Registration Officer, one for each Assembly seat. But the software used by the poll panel reportedly curtails that role and is heavily centralised, giving control to the DG (IT) of the poll panel.
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EROs are usually SDM-level officers who prepare voter lists, hear claims and objections, and decide which names are included or deleted.
The CEO has demanded that EROs be allowed to decide to exempt a person from a hearing if they are satisfied with the documents submitted.
On September 26, after a meeting of the full Commission, the Commission issued a statement that partially addressed the Maharashtra requests, giving EROs the discretion to exempt people flagged for logical discrepancies from personal hearings.
It also said “various upgradations of the portal have already been made based on the inputs from State CEOs in the past few months,” and that “in case any further flexibility is required by the field officers, that will be made operational.”
As reported by The Indian Express, Sandhu wrote on August 14 that CEOs, DEOs and EROs, the statutory authorities for the voters’ list, were reporting they could not perform their duties, with their powers “curtailed by centralised control of ERONet at DG(IT) level.” “It is strange,” he said, “that all the responsibilities regarding Electoral Roll lie on EROs, DEOs and CEOs as per law, but the access control has been centralised by DG(IT).”
The Maharashtra draft roll, published on August 31, cut 21.1 per cent of the state’s electors. Its final roll is due on November 16.
Over two crore names have been deleted from the Maharashtra draft voter list in the SIR process and most of these are either dead or shifted voters, Chockalingam has told NDTV.
