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EC/ SEC - symbol of incompetence, incapacity, apathy, lack of accountability, all put together
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
murali772 - 3 July, 2012 - 13:13
I mailed as below to CEC, Dr S Y Quraishi, IAS (syquraishi@eci.gov.in), on Feb 27.
Dear Dr Quraishi
Ever since I saw your interview on NDTV by Ms Sonia Singh, a few months back, I have been meaning to write to you. Now, again with the Gandhinagar (Bangalore) election recording a very poor voter turnout, I was meminded of my resolve, and hence this letter. All I am requesting you is to go through this blogpost, and see if it makes sense. And, if it does, issue necessary correctives.
Regards, Muralidhar Rao, President, PRAJA-RAAG
Further, I sent reminders on Mar 15, Mar 26, May 17. None of the mails bounced; but, all met with stony silence. Even with knowing what the problem was, as also its enormity, he refused to effect the necessary correctives. One wonders why.
Dr Quraishi has since retired. His name came up as one of the probables for Presidentship even. I am sure he will be assigned some cushy sinecure soon - totally undeserving, though, if you ask me. Well, he is not the first, right?
response to point made by Comdr P G Bhat
murali772 - 10 August, 2012 - 11:37
Thanks for this effort, Murali.
Voter rolls in neighboring states are far better. As a sample, I have analysed 357 lists of Malkajgiri constituency in AP. They are of higher quality than the 6,389 lists of Karnataka which I studied.
More importantly, I suspect indiscriminate deletions while leaving blatant duplicate entries intact. Without privileged access and sitting at home, we can find thousands of duplicate entries. If we analyse deeper and verify, there could be lakhs of duplicate entries as well as lakhs of people excluded by deletions. .
To begin with Commander, it's your persistant efforts and the lackadaisical responses to them from the powers that be, that made me start this petition
The accuracy may be better in AP. In fact, I am told it's really good in Himachal. But, if somebody from Bangalore takes a transfer to Hyderabad, or Shimla, have they facilitated the transfer process to enable him to exercise his franchise on the 181st day of his settling in these cities? I very much doubt it. And, that kind of a facilitation cannot be done by a set of amateurs. That's where professional players come in. Today's papers inform that India Post has similarly teamed up with Infosys to provide a set of services. Plainly these kinds of things cannot be entrusted to companies floated by the likes of Katta Subramania Naidu's son, which is unfortunately what is happening today.
latest on offer from CEO - sex change!
murali772 - 21 August, 2012 - 05:08
2,877 voters have changed their sex in the records.
For the full text of the write-up by Cdr Bhat, click here
murali772 - 3 July, 2012 - 12:25
The following are the extracts from Cdr P G Bhat's blog. Cdr Bhat incidentally was the 'commander' of the SmartVote team that extracted the voters' lists from the SEC site and published them on their site, in the process revealing to the public their total incapacity and incompetence in carrying out the job, cited in the media reports in the opening post, above.
Blog dt 02/07/12 (full blog may be accessed here):
Dr Balu told in a talk yesterday that denial of opportunity to a citizen is a crime. Here the EC is denying a large percentage of our population their right to vote, by being non-professional and callous. By making it difficult to access, sort and filter the data, the EC is denying information to those who do not know how to extract information from the current mess.
Blog dt 30/06/12 (full blog may be accessed here):
On 19 June a tech savvy expert deputy of the CEO, in the presence of ten people, searches for the real Suranjan in CEO’S website. Other deputies help him with suggestions. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men could not find the person hidden in the lists his organisation has created for public consumption. “The name certainly is in the list,” says the CEO.
Blog dt 15/06/12 (full blog may be accessed here):
On 10 April 2010 I presented the issues in National Conference of Association for Democratic Reforms held at Bhopal, suggesting some solutions. The conference was attended by many officials from Election Commission, including Mr. Chawla, the CEC. After my presentation, several people from the audience discussed the situation with me and some officials promised action. Inaction?
Dr. Meenakshi Bharath organised a few meetings with CEO and SEO of Karnataka where we demonstrated blatant problems in the process of creating and maintaining the voter list and suggested approaches to improve the situation. We were told that the Election Commission was aware of all our observations and were already doing whatever we suggested. We were to have a error-free, bullet proof, shining voter list by August 2010. We also tried in vain to meet the CEC team when they visited Bangalore in late 2010.
Apparently, very little has changed since. And, it is not as if the matter has not come to their notice. But, for reasons that can only be speculated upon, they seem to be refusing to effect the necessary correctives. Shouldn't the Civil Society join together to address and set right this problem as a priority, well before the impending state assembly elections, with a view to getting a better set of people to represent them?
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