Narayankhed bypoll registers 80% polling

Narayankhed: For the first time in the history of Narayankhed, an election was held in a peaceful manner. No incident of violence was reported. According to District Collector Ronald Rose, 80 percent of polling was recorded which is three percent higher than the polling percentage of 2014.

However, in several polling booths, people were distressed about their names having been deleted from the voters’ list. For instance, in Bibipet village of Kalher mandal, out of the 1,391 votes under two polling booths, 327 votes were deleted, though there were 117 new voters enrolled before the by-election.

The reasons given by the district administration was that 95 per cent of the deleted voters were migrants who were no longer ordinary residents of the constituency. However for instance, Chakali Hanumanlu and his family are residents of Bibipet. There were six voters in his family.

They claimed to have completed all the formalities for Aadhar seeding (linking their voter id with Aadhar card). They said that they were also present when the Booth Level Officer surveyed the families in the village while linking Aadhar. But they found their names to have been deleted from the voters list on the day of the election.

There were also families where husband and wife had both migrated to other places. The husband’s name was deleted but the wife name was in the list. Many of such discrepancies were seen during the by-election in several polling booths, which do raise doubts about the administrative efficiency in completing Aadhar seeding.

Whether it was lack of awareness among the voters or a lack of proactive approach undertaken by the administration, thousands of voters were left disappointed. The voters held the Booth Level Officers responsible for the mess.

However, when we compare the total voters registered for the by-election (1, 88, 000 voters) with the ones registered in 2014 general elections (2, 00,005), it would be clear that about 12,000 voters were deleted from the list for reasons better known to the authorities.

Mock polling of votes was done to ensure proper working of Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) before the start of election. In two polling booths, EVMs were changed before polling started. Webcasting, live streaming and video graphing using live streaming was done in the polling booths. The District Collector toured all the mandals visiting several polling booths.

At least on one occasion, he removed an agent belonging to a political party for participating as an agent, though he was working as a Vidya Volunteer in a ZPTC school. He also interacted with the people and inquired about the problems they were facing. Counting of the votes would start on February 16, at 8 am.