By IANS,
Chandigarh : Between the general elections in April-May and now, the Election Commission of India has registered 12 lakh new voters in Haryana, Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) Navin Chawla said Saturday.
He was speaking to reporters after the full commission met with Haryana government officials on the preparations for the Oct 13 assembly polls.
“The election-population ratio in the May 2009 election was 50.13 percent. As per records, it should have been 57 percent. We have revised electoral rolls and have included 12 lakh new voters,” Chawla said.
Election Commissioner S.Y. Quraishi said there were still about 500,000 voters who were not on the state’s electoral rolls as they were eligible to be voters, being over 18 years of age, but had not registered themselves as voters.
Chawla said there were over 1.2 crore voters in the state, including nearly 55 lakh women. As many as 12,894 polling stations would be set up for the elections to the 90-member Haryana assembly.
Chawla said that people from the Resident Welfare Associations (RWAs) and residents of Badshahpur area of Gurgaon district had filed complaints about their names not being included in the electoral rolls in the Lok Sabha polls.
“We have received over 12 lakh applications for inclusion of names in Gurgaon. Some forms have been deposited in bulk by the RWAs. This is a departure from our procedure not to accept bulk applications. This has been done under special partnership with the RWAs. Photo I-cards will be issued to these voters by Sep 30,” Chawla said.
Chawla said that EVMs will be used in all polling stations in the state.
The CEC said that the controversy over tampering with EVMs had been put to rest and representatives of political parties, who had met the Commission twice last month, had not been able to prove that the EVMs could be tampered with.
“We are completely satisfied with these machines. These cannot be hacked through computers like has been done in Germany,” Chawla maintained.
He added that the Commission had refused to give its EVMs to some parties who wanted to take away the machines and show how they could be tampered with. “We cannot give these machines to anyone. They can come and prove to us if these can be tampered with. With the video-recording and other procedures, it is impossible to tamper with the EVMs,” Chawla pointed out.