ravi - 30 April, 2009 | Mysore | Elections | Voter ID | Citizen Reports | Election Commission | VoterID

Background: My family has been voting in the same constituency since, at least, the 1952 elections(Guess, my grandparents had voted in the Representative Assembly elections too, that's pre-independence era). They have been voting in the same voting booth(Immaculate Heart Convent) since its inception.
What transpired: Today(30^th April, 2009) when my parents had gone to vote, they were in for a rude shock, their entries in the Electoral Roll were marked as "Deleted"!

The Presiding Officer and the policeman were especially rude, when my parents were trying to look for their name at the enquiry desk(in a neighbouring room), they were shouted at that they(poll officers) had already confirmed that their names are deleted and that they should have verified two months back itself. The Presiding Officer told them to approach the political parties camping outside the voting booth.

Also, normally the slips from various political parties which used to litter our porch was missing this time!

Verification: I had checked all the drafts of the roll put online which are in PDF format exported from Crystal Reports with text in Kannada, that's in proprietary ASCII, Nudi font-encoding, that's hard to search, but I searched the Election Photo Identity Card Number and found the entries.

Solution: I tried to call the Deputy Commissioner, as he is the Chief Electoral Officer for Mysore but could not get his number. So I called Chief Electoral Officer of Karnataka, I suspect that I got the man himself on the phone, he gave me a helpline number that's set up exclusively for the polls.

When I called the helpline and explained the situation to the gentleman(who refused to reveal his name), he advised me to print the page in the Final Published Electoral Roll including a page before and after that and gave a me a mobile number of a Poll Observer who's a bureaucrat from a different state, he said he will come to the booth and get the problem resolved.

The mobile phone was not picked by the observer.

After seven phone calls and five hours. They got to vote at 1.30 PM, flanked to the voting booth by an Asst. Commissioner, few policemen and the observer.

How? The names had been moved to the next Roll, to the next Polling Room, tucked away in a remote corner.

Funnily, similarly many others, most of whom we are acquainted with also had their entries marked "Deleted"(AFAIK more than 70!), this includes the family who publish the most famous panchanga in these parts, a former judge, many academics and there is nothing logical about their choice other than all of them being educated and their surnames or father's names indicating them to belong to particular religious community(call me communal!), what gives strength to my doubt is that names of their children(including me and my bro') have not been affected as we neither have any surname nor our father's names strongly indicate the religious identity.

The Presiding Officer in the booth buried his head in a book and did not lift his head even to respond to my parents' greeting.

This explains to me why my cousin(who voted for the first time) had the same voting booth which her parents originally used to vote but her parents' names were transferred to another booth 3km away!

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