Mangaluru: The names are in the draft voters’ list, but for lakhs of voters in Karnataka, the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) is far from over.
Voters are being called to hearing centres to explain discrepancies in their electoral records.
What is becoming apparent at these hearings is that not every discrepancy is a complicated one.
In several cases, the explanation is as simple as a woman having her maiden and surname name in an old electoral roll and her married name in the present record, or initials being expanded in a later document.
Yet such voters are joining the same queue as those whose names have no mapping with the earlier roll or whose records require detailed verification.
Around 43.80 lakh voters in Karnataka have been served notices in connection with the SIR exercise.
The notices cover a wide range of reasons — from “unmapped with last SIR” and self-name mismatch to unusual age differences involving parents, children and grandparents.
The hearing centres therefore offer a useful picture of what happens when a computer-generated discrepancy meets an individual voter and his or her documents.
A mismatch that appears significant in a database can sometimes be explained within minutes once the voter produces an old electoral record, school certificate or other supporting document.
At one hearing centre in Udupi, a woman who had received a notice for “self name mismatch” appeared before the officials with her documents.
During the verification, officials found that her name in the old SIR roll was her maiden name and surname, while her present electoral record carried the name of her husband with the surname.
There was no complicated dispute to settle. The list itself provided the explanation and the discrepancy was corrected.
But the voter had still gone through the entire process — receiving the notice, travelling to the hearing centre, waiting for her term and producing the documents before the matter could be closed.
That experience is being repeated in different forms at hearing centres. Tokens are being issued to regulate the crowd and voters are being called one by one.
In many cases, the actual interaction with the official lasts only a few minutes, while the waiting time can stretch to one or two hours.
The issue, therefore, is not whether electoral records should be verified. There is a clear need to maintain an accurate and clean electoral roll.
The question being raised by voters and some officials is whether more of the routine verification could have been completed during the enumeration stage itself.
KPCC spokesperson and activist MG Hegde is among those who believe this could have reduced the burden on both voters and election officials.
He himself received a notice over a name discrepancy, despite his old and present names being traceable through official documents.
“In the 2002 electoral roll, my name was MG Hegde. It was later recorded as Mahabaleshwara G Hegde. I went to the hearing centre and waited for about one-and-a-half hours.
The officer took my SSLC marks card, uploaded it and the process was completed in about two minutes,” Hegde said.
For Hegde, the time taken for verification was not the issue.
It was the fact that a case that could be settled in two minutes after seeing a document had required a separate hearing.
“They had the 2002 list. The photo, person, relatives are all same. Yet the notice was issued.
The details from the 2002 list could have been included in the enumeration form itself.
If there was a change in the name or an age difference in the family details, the voter could have explained the reason and attached the necessary document. An option for explanation related to any changes should have been given in the enumeration form itself,” he told Deccan Chronicle.
His point becomes more relevant when viewed against the numbers at the hearing centres. A voter with a minor name variation and another whose name is completely absent from the earlier SIR roll may be standing in the same queue, waiting for the same verification process.
“If I had to wait for more than an hour for a small issue like mine, people with serious issues such as ‘unmapped with last SIR’ also had to wait. If the smaller discrepancies had been sorted out during enumeration, the officials could have concentrated on the cases that really required detailed scrutiny,” Hegde said.
An election official involved in the process also acknowledged that some discrepancies could have been identified earlier. “Had the BLOs been asked to take details such as self-name mismatch while filling the enumeration form itself, it would have been easier,” the official said.
The hearings are also throwing up discrepancies that may look unusual when reduced to numbers in a database. Notices have been issued in cases involving a progeny age gap of less than nine months, parent age differences of less than 15 years or more than 50 years, grandparent age differences of less than 40 years and other family-related variations.
The nine-month rule, for instance, can create a peculiar situation. Twins can technically fall within the category because their dates of birth are the same and therefore less than nine months apart.
“These are small issues which could have been solved in the BLO level itself,” he added.
Some of the age-related differences also have to be viewed against the social conditions reflected in older records. People in earlier generations often married and had children at younger ages. A difference that appears unusual when compared through a database may therefore have a perfectly ordinary explanation when the family history and documents are examined. Sometimes the mistake might also have been because of a technical error.
This is where the experience of the BLOs and AEROs becomes important. A computer system can flag a numerical variation, but it cannot by itself explain why a woman’s name changed, why initials were expanded or why two children have birth dates less than nine months apart.
The official sitting at the hearing centre has to do that final piece of verification.
Another difficulty is the absence of supporting documents. Some voters do not have old records relating to their parents or children. In such cases, officials have to examine whatever documents are available and establish whether the relationship or discrepancy can be satisfactorily explained.
For elderly and bedridden voters, the problem is even more basic. Some of those served notices are unable to travel to the hearing centre, forcing officials to visit their homes to complete the verification. Voters argue that such cases could perhaps have been identified when BLOs were already visiting households during the enumeration.
There is also a significant amount of repetitive work at the hearing centres. Officials have been instructed to photograph documents and upload them as part of the verification. When a photograph is unclear or an upload fails, the document has to be photographed and uploaded again.
The officials are generally spending time explaining the requirements and helping voters complete the process. But even when each case takes only a few minutes, the cumulative effect is a long queue.
For voters, the frustration is less about being asked to prove their identity than about having to repeat information they believe was already available with the election machinery.
The door-to-door enumeration was the first point of contact. BLOs met voters, collected forms and gathered details. If the enumeration mechanism had specifically provided for recording name changes, initials, family-age discrepancies and supporting documents, some of these cases might have been resolved before notices were issued.
That does not mean every discrepancy could have been settled at the doorstep. Cases involving “no mapping” with the previous SIR roll, major changes in names or the absence of a clear documentary trail would still require hearings.
But a distinction between routine discrepancies and cases requiring deeper verification could potentially have made the subsequent exercise more manageable.
The hearings have also brought another issue into the conversation — the treatment of VIPs. Voters understand why officials may have to visit elderly, bedridden or otherwise immobile persons. What they question is whether similar arrangements should exist merely because someone is considered a VIP.
“I can understand officials visiting elderly or bedridden people. But why should there be a separate VIP arrangement? For voting, everybody comes to the same polling booth. Then who is a VIP for SIR process?” an employee at a private company who had come for a hearing center asked.
There is also a larger expectation among voters: that once the present verification is completed, the records should remain usable without another large-scale exercise being imposed on the same people in the future.
Voters said they hoped the exercise would be final and that they would not be made to go through the same process again after a couple of decades.
The Karnataka exercise is also taking place after SIR has already been carried out in other states. MG Hegde said the experience elsewhere should have been used to identify shortcomings and modify the process before it reached Karnataka.
“They have already conducted the process in other states. They should have learnt from the problems there and upgraded the process in the next state,” he said.
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: deccanchronicle.com
