Bhubaneswar: Opposition BJD and Congress on Friday claimed that voting by residents of Koraput’s Kotia region in neighbouring Andhra Pradesh’s rural elections had exposed loopholes in the SIR of electoral rolls, which they alleged had led to the deletion of crores of voters’ names.
BJD deputy leader in the Assembly and former minister Prasanna Acharya raised the issue, referring to residents of Kotia in Koraput district voting in Andhra Pradesh’s rural elections on Thursday.
“How can a citizen vote in two places? People whose names are enrolled in the Odisha voter list have also got themselves registered in the Andhra Pradesh voter list. Hundreds of residents of Kotia reportedly voted in Andhra Pradesh despite the SIR exercise being conducted in both states. Had the SIR been conducted properly, these people would not have been able to vote in two places,” Acharya said.
Claiming that the opposition’s allegations against the SIR were “100 per cent correct”, the veteran leader said the Kotia episode had exposed flaws in the exercise conducted by the Election Commission.
“One does not require a microscope to find errors in the SIR. The Kotia election is enough to prove that the exercise was not conducted properly. It should be reviewed, as demanded by BJD president Naveen Patnaik,” he said.
“The allegations of opposition parties have been justified by this election,” Acharya added.Former minister and Odisha Pradesh Congress Committee president Jaydev Jena also criticised the SIR exercise.
“The rural polls in Andhra Pradesh have proved what our leader Rahul Gandhi has been telling the nation for a long time. The SIR is completely error-ridden, faulty and politically motivated. It must be rejected and a fresh exercise should be conducted with complete transparency,” Jena said.
Meanwhile, Odisha Law Minister Prithiviraj Harichandan said the state government would look into the matter.
“The Revenue Department needs to identify people who have dual voter identity cards and initiate legal action against them. Our government prevented Andhra Pradesh from setting up polling booths on Odisha soil. Despite that, some people crossed over to Andhra Pradesh and cast their votes,” Harichandan said.
The Koraput district administration also acknowledged that some residents of Kotia had crossed the inter-state border to participate in the Andhra Pradesh rural elections.
“According to our estimate, around 10 per cent of voters from Kotia exercised their franchise in the neighbouring state’s panchayat elections. I reject the claim that around 40 per cent of voters cast their votes,” Koraput Collector Manoj Satyawan Mahajan told reporters. He said the 40 per cent turnout figure cited by Andhra Pradesh officials was based on combined voting at a polling booth that catered to several villages, including those in Andhra Pradesh.
“We have information that people from four to five villages went to cast their votes in Andhra Pradesh. The population of these villages is smaller than what the voting percentage claimed by Andhra Pradesh officials would suggest,” Mahajan said.
The Collector said the district administration had two objectives — preventing Andhra Pradesh from setting up a polling booth inside Kotia and discouraging residents from participating in elections in the neighbouring state.
“We were completely successful in preventing the setting up of a polling booth inside Kotia. However, a few villagers still went to vote. The booth also catered to several villages in Andhra Pradesh. Therefore, the claim of 40 per cent polling cannot be attributed to Kotia residents alone,” he said.
Reiterating that Kotia was an integral part of Odisha, Mahajan said the administration would continue its engagement with the region beyond elections, with greater emphasis on infrastructure development, livelihood generation and tourism.
Andhra Pradesh election officials had claimed that 1,150 of the 2,899 registered voters in Kotia had exercised their franchise in the Mandal Parishad Territorial Constituencies and Zilla Parishad Territorial Constituencies elections, recording a turnout of around 40 per cent.
