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EC/ SEC - symbol of incompetence, incapacity, apathy, lack of accountability, all put together

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Written By murali772 - 16 February, 2010

Bangalore Koramangala Democracy Elections Citizen Reports efficiency outsourcing Others Everything else

During the Koramangala SmartVote exercise, this is what the members chanced upon "We introduced the software mainly to enable voters to start an easy search for their names on the voter lists online. However, in the process, we found that a number of names were exactly replicated. That set us thinking — what happened to the 3,000 names originally on the list?" For the full report in the TOI, click here.

The Citizen Matters report is even more graphic. But, what's even more shocking is the fact is that there are over one lakh duplicate EPIC cards floating around, which fact has been brought out in the original report prepared by SmartVote.

Very plainly this is quite the height of incompetence, incapacity, apathy, lack of accountability - all put together on the part of the Ec/ SEC combine. I would label it nothing less than subversion of the country's democracy, as much as any Naxalite or such activity. It's high time the people demanded the total revamping of the entire EC/ SEC set up, after sacking the present incumbents, and functions such as preparation and maintenance of voter lists, etc outsourced to competent professional agencies, quite like UK and many other advanced countries are already doing with a large part of their visa processing - check this

Enough is enough!

Muralidhar Rao
 

COMMENTS

crying shame

murali772 - 1 March, 2010 - 05:52

The plight of many other common voters across the city is worse. A late father-in-law is shown as husband, more than 50 voters are aged 150 years, some even 0 and below 18 years. A deeper search will elicit that one Shankar from Okalipuram (ward 96, Gandhinagar assembly) is 655 years old! A ‘Thayamma’ under ‘Other’s name’ lives at house number 271, which has at least 33 voters. These are just a few other surprises on the list.

What went wrong? - We are looking into the real reasons for this error as the hard copies available with us are all correct.

For the full report in the TOI, click here.

The question should be 'what is wrong' - not 'what went wrong'. And, the answer is 'everything'. The present team is just not capable of doing a proper job; just restructure the entire set up, with the job of preparing and maintaining the voters' lists across the country outsourced to professional private players.

the answer is staring in the face

murali772 - 8 March, 2010 - 06:04

Passport Seva Kendras (PSK) will make the application process more user-friendly; front-end activities will be outsourced to private partners. Also, online links will be established with district police headquarters in all states for quick verification. "These reforms were needed due to unintentional delays. A serious exercise has begun to bring about structural reforms too. The main data centre for PSKs will be in Delhi; a data recovery centre will be in Chennai and other network operations unit will be based in Delhi," Mr S M Krishna said. For the full report in the TOI, click here.

The outsourcing is to none less than TCS, and not some fly-by-night operator, like the SEC has presently engaged for issue of the EPIC's. When the Passport Department can undertake such structural radical reforms, what prevents the EC/ SEC from following suit?

 


Voter Id - Key to democratic process

Naveen - 9 March, 2010 - 11:41

The voter list is the key element in the democratic governance of the country. There can be no cost higher than when it is inaccurate

Mr Murali - Agreed. Some way has to be found to meet costs for refurbishing the rickety voter id system since charging all voters is impossible. There is some hope now with the UID project, & hopefully, they will tackle voter Id cards much more seriously too since data would all be made readily available, which is perhaps more than half the job done !

Not comparable

Naveen - 8 March, 2010 - 12:16

Passport applicants pay high charges for their passports. Issue of an income-tax tax PAN card (thro' UTITSL / NSDL) is also very efficient & an applicant has to pay Rs.94/- for the service. These are applied for by people with higher incomes who seek efficiency & quality.

Voter ID cards are free & every single individual is eligible for one - the number is 1.2 billion !  The aam aadmis, mostly are the ones that actually use it for voting (The urban rich take it for anything other than voting).

Unless a way has been found to meet the higher costs for better & efficient services for improving the voter id card system, nothing will change. Perhaps govt needs to subsidize the costs as charging for voter id cards is politically difficult.

good enough? - I don't think so.

murali772 - 24 April, 2013 - 11:41

The total number of voters in Bangalore urban district, including BBMP limits, is 70,32,000. This is equal to 67.58 percent Electoral Population (EP) ratio. On April 7, the closing day of voters' registration it was 65.19.

"Before summary revision of the voters' list (during January), the voter population was 57 lakh. After the electoral registration drive, it became 64.42 lakh. With the announcement of election, once again voter's registration drive was conducted in IT companies, colleges, public places and now we have crossed 70 lakh. Every eligible voter is included in the voters' list," said Siddaiah. As per statistics, the EP ratio is the highest in Bangalore, across the country.
 
For the full report in the ToI, click here.
 
The info furninshed by the SEC, BBMP combo on these matters, in the past, have generally been found unreliable, and consequently, one can't quite be too sure about these too. Besides, the last time around, SmartVote had pulled out the details from the SEC site and found pages after pages being repeated in different constituencies, perhaps to jack up the numbers. This time around, the SEC has made its data more secure, which SmartVote is yet to crack, and therefore we don't know if they have adopted the same "technique" to jack up the numbers.
 
Further, the question of correctness of the new entries, we will know only after they are made accessible, which, if I undersatnd correctly, is yet to happen.
 
Well, even granting that the numbers are correct, the questions that remain are:
1) Shouldn't the facility of registration as a voter be available right through the year, so that when a person attains the age of 18, and has resided at a location for 6 months, he/ she is readily able to get onto the list?
2) Is transposition of voters (using Form-8A) available across states? If not, what is the procedure to be adopted when a registered voter shifts to a different state? If yes, how can it work when the master voter lists are apparently maintained in regional languages?
3) What about the spelling, age, sex and other errors, which when attempting to correct through Form-6A, end up generating a fresh set of errors?
4) What about the differences in the entries between the list and the EPIC?
All in all, should not this all important job, which is fundamental to the country's democratic functioning, be done by professionals, rather than a set of part-timers? Can the country afford to work with such shoddy voters' lists? The back-end work of the passport department is today being done by TCS; similar is the arrangement between Income Tax dept and Infosys. When that is the case, isn't it time this job (of preparing and maintaining the voters' list) is also outsourced to similar organisations? 

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