Bengaluru: More than 1 lakh voters who were on the possible deletion list in Karnataka are back on the draft voters’ list during the nine-day extension for the special intensive revision of electoral rolls.The surprising development has brought under lens the role of booth-level officers (BLOs) and whether they revisited locked houses more than once as has been mandated, besides shedding light on vigilant civil society groups which are closely tracking the SIR process.Data from the office of chief electoral officer shows the ‘others’ count dropped by 11.14% between Aug 8 and 18, in the data calculated after the final enumeration deadline of Aug 17. ‘Others’ category is part of a larger ASDDO (absent, shifted, dead, duplicate and others) classification in which voters, who are unaccounted for, are marked under any of these five categories.The number of voters on ASDDO dropped from 1.09 crore to 1.07 crore — a 1.22% reduction — in the nine-day extended period.Officially, ‘others’ tag is reserved for voters who “refused to sign” the enumeration form. Election Commission officials have maintained that this group largely consists of people whose names may already exist in another voter list or those who chose not to share details fearing legal consequences if they are tagged as duplicate.A sharp spike in ‘others’ count ahead of the earlier Aug 8 deadline had civil society groups tracking the numbers closely. Their suspicion: It might be a result of BLOs failing to revisit homes to collect and log completed forms before the cut-off date.While ‘others’ count dropped 11.1% in the extended period of enumeration, ‘absent’ and ‘shifted’ categories, too, fell by 3.4% and 0.6%, respectively. On the other hand, ‘dead’ and ‘duplicate’ entries marginally went up by 0.2% and 1.6%, respectively.Officials and BLOs admitted they were working under strict deadlines through the exercise. “ECI claims those in the ‘others’ category are people who refused to sign, but it is far from the truth. BLOs were randomly marking residents as ‘others’ or ‘permanently shifted’ or ‘absent’. In several cases, they did not visit the houses again. There was pressure to complete the entries for enumeration, and they banked on re-verification during the extended period,” said Adam Khan, state committee member, Jagrutha Karnataka, which is coordinating with booth-level agents and voters in SIR process.BOXASDDO list shrinks by 35k on last dayAfter the closing of enumeration phase Monday, the CEO’s office had a slightly reduced ASDDO list — from 1.08 crore to 1.07 crore. On Tuesday, the state recorded a dip of 35,530 voters. Over 19.4 per cent voters (out of 5.5 crore) in the state will be knocked off the draft list — of these 11.8 pere cent are permanently shifted, 2.7 pere cent are absent, 2.9 % dead, 1.2 % duplicate and 0.6 % are in “others” category.
