New electoral roll system to be used in 2009 polls

Chief Election Commissioner N Gopalaswami has said that a new metropolitan electoral roll management system would soon be put in place to tackle the high intra-city and inter-city migration of voters.
Addressing a meeting at the National Police Academy in Hyderabad on Monday, the CEC said preparation of fool-proof electoral rolls was essential to bust bogus voting in elections.
Photo electoral rolls would be used in the 2009 general elections across the country, barring the north-eastern states.
Though the process of issuing electoral photo identity cards started in 1995, “we never achieved 100 per cent success for a variety of reasons,” he said.
Pointing to the “increasing complexities” in the entire electoral process, the CEC said multi-level checking of electoral rolls was being undertaken to compare the 18-plus population as per census data with the number of registered voters.
Also, an analysis of male-female voters was also being done to ensure nothing was amiss, Gopalaswami said referring to the scene in Uttar Pradesh where the ratio of male-females voters was 1000:700 as against the normal male-female ratio of 1000:898.
“We now have the electoral roll observers in place who thoroughly verify the electoral rolls and check discrepancies. This has been yielding good results in rural areas but there have been problems in urban centres,” the Chief Election Commissioner observed.
He said a list of missing voters was also being prepared in each polling station to ensure the eligible persons did not lose their voting right.
Gopalaswami said from 17.32 crore in 1951, the number of voters in the country shot up to 67.14 crore in 2004 and 69.60 crore in 2008.
“The next general election will see the use of electronic voting machines across the country for the first time,” he added.
The CEC also said postal voting for all personnel deployed for election duties was being considered.
“This has been experimented in Tripura in the last elections. But it is not a fool-proof system at this point of time,” he pointed out.
The Election Commission was planning to initiate a new experiment of electronically transmitting the postal ballots and enable voting as the present system of printing and posting the ballots at a single point was causing lot of delays.
“We are also looking into the system of proxy voting,” Gopalaswami said adding that efforts were on to improve electoral registration of army and central para-military service personnel.
There were 959 registered political parties in the country with an average of three parties getting registered every week.
“Of the total, only seven are national parties and 49 state (regional) parties,” he said. The EC did not have power to de-register a party for whatever reason, the CEC pointed out.

http://newsheadlines.telugupedia.com/2008/10/21/chief-election-commissioner-new-electoral-roll-system-to-be-used-in-2009-polls/#more-830