New Delhi, Aug 2 (IANS) The Election Commission is all set to introduce new electoral rolls with photographs of voters that can be matched with the identity cards they carry to increase the fairness of the polls.
According to Chief Election Commissioner N. Gopalaswamy, the poll panel will introduce the new electoral rolls in the next general elections in 2009.
“The rolls will have the photograph of the voter besides his or her name for proper identification,” Gopalaswamy said while delivering a lecture at the Foreign Service Institute here.
But he added that this would be “a time consuming process”.
He also said that Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) more than 15 years old would be replaced by new machines with more features.
“The new machines will have mechanisms to keep records for five years. These records can be used if there is a court case challenging the results,” Gopalasamy told young diplomats from various countries.
“It will also have an interface to connect (various electronic voting) machines so that results can be announced even faster.”
He said that data about electoral rolls, which are being computerised, would be made accessible to the public to ensure accuracy.
But he admitted that the poll panel’s efforts to make the electoral rolls 100 percent error free had not been successful.
“It has never been satisfactory. Around 1-1.5 percent of voters go out of the rolls every year and there are 2 percent fresh additions. The huge inter-state movements also result in at least 8 percent changes in the lists. We have not been able to find an answer to these problems.
“It is impossible to compare the names of 680 million voters through a data base. There are instances when we found a man in Madhya Pradesh had 147 election identity cards!”
Gopalaswamy said the Election Commission had tried to maintain accuracy through checking the male-female ratio against the census data of the area, vulnerable mapping and assessment of votes.
“Over the years, the Election Commission has moved from macro management of election to micro management,” he said.
It has introduced a system in which the voters’ names in the electoral rolls would be read out in the panchayats in rural areas. In urban areas this task is to be given to resident welfare associations.
The poll panel tried to measure the accuracy of the electoral rolls of 500,000 names in Tamil Nadu by running a de-duplication software developed by Microsoft. But it found to its horror that a name could be written in 185 different ways.