PANAJI
Nearly 35,000 voters deleted from Goa’s electoral rolls during the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) have already made a comeback through fresh enrolment, with thousands more now set to get an opportunity to re-enter the rolls following a key relaxation by the Election Commission of India (ECI).
The ECI has withdrawn the additional SIR declaration attached to the online Form 6 application in states and Union Territories where the electoral roll revision exercise has been completed, including Goa. The move is expected to provide an opportunity to over 35,000 more electors who were marked ineligible under the ‘unmapped’ and ‘Logical Discrepancies’ categories, as they will no longer have to furnish the additional declaration relating to their own or their parents’ electoral details from the last SIR conducted at their place of ordinary residence. Such applicants can now seek fresh enrolment by submitting the statutory Form 6 prescribed under the Registration of Electors Rules, 1960. Goa’s SIR exercise began on October 27, when the electoral roll had around 11.85 lakh voters. Following the revision, the number of eligible electors stood at 10.57 lakh. The exercise identified 1,00,042 voters under the ASDD (Absent, Shifted, Dead and Duplicate) category, after election authorities failed to receive their enumeration forms. Of these, 25,574 were declared dead, while 40,469 were identified as permanently shifted to other States. “Total 35,000 voters have been enrolled in the electoral roll on filing of Form 6 so far,” Chief Electoral Officer Sanjay Goel told The Goan.
Goel said 12,166 voters were also added as fresh inclusions during the exercise. He maintained that voters whose names had been deleted were not barred from seeking re-inclusion. “Nobody whose names were deleted is barred from reapplying for inclusion of their names. Electoral roll is a continuous updation and everybody has a right to get their names included,” Goel said.
Apart from the ASDD category, the SIR resulted in a net deletion of 27,426 voters. Further, out of these 9,02,589 mapped electors, 58,923 number of electors were listed as Logical Discrepancies (LD) by the ECI IT system due to discrepancies in mapping identified under various categories in the ECINET including mis-match in father’s name, parents age difference, grandparents age difference, etc. This was followed by issuance of notices and conducting hearings/ collecting documents as per the provisions made available in the ECINET. Following the exercise, total 35,780 electors were marked as ineligible after deciding cases under category unmapped and Logical Discrepancies.
On voters identified as permanently shifted, Goel said they would ordinarily have registered themselves in the States where they had moved, and therefore there should be no question of registering them again in Goa and creating duplication.
The ECI’s withdrawal of the additional declaration now removes one of the requirements that had been linked specifically to the SIR exercise, allowing eligible applicants in Goa to pursue fresh enrolment through the regular statutory Form 6 process.
