New Delhi: In its effort to sanitise the electoral rolls and keep them updated, the Election Commission of India has resolved a nearly 20-year-old legacy issue of similar Electoral Photo Identity Card (EPIC) numbers issued to genuine electors in different states, an official source said on Tuesday.
The official source said the issue cropped up because similar series were used by different Electoral Registration Officers (EROs) in such cases since 2005.
To resolve this long-pending problem, the entire electoral database of over 99 crore electors was searched by CEOs of all the 36 States/UTs and EROs of all the 4,123 Assembly constituencies with 10.50 lakh polling stations.
On average, there are about 1,000 electors per polling station. The figure of similar EPIC numbers found was miniscule, i.e. averaging to around 1 (one) in 4 (four) polling stations, said an official source.
During the field-level verification, it was found that holders of such similar EPIC numbers were genuine electors in different Assembly constituencies and different polling stations. All such electors have since been issued new EPIC cards with new numbers.
The genesis of the issue has been traced to 2005, when various States/ UTs were using Assembly Constituency-wise different alphanumeric series in a decentralised manner, the source said.
These series had to be changed again in 2008, after delimitation of the constituencies. During this period, some Assembly Constituencies erroneously continued to use either the old series or, because of typographic errors, used the series allotted to some other constituencies.
Every voter’s name is in the electoral roll of the polling station, where he/she is an ordinary resident. Having an EPIC of a similar number never enabled any such person to vote at any other polling station. Thus, the issue of a similar EPIC could not have impacted the results of any elections, said the source.
In February, West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee accused the BJP of manipulating the electoral rolls “with the blessings of the ECI” and enrolling people from Punjab, Haryana and Gujarat as electors in West Bengal. She had also asked her party leaders to find out the “fake voters”.
(IANS)
