EC strategy pays off as voters throng booths

Election Commission officials have attributed the high voter turnout in the five states that went to polls to primarily two things: weeding out duplicate and fake voters from electoral rolls and awareness campaigns launched by the chief electoral officers.

Updated on: Dec 5, 2013, 23:15:20 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Election Commission officials have attributed the high voter turnout in the five states that went to polls to primarily two things: weeding out duplicate and fake voters from electoral rolls and awareness campaigns launched by the chief electoral officers.

Delhi recorded 65.86% voting, the highest in assembly (or metropolitan council) polls since 1972, when 68.66% of voters voted for the metropolitan council.

Similarly, the voter turnout in Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Rajasthan and Mizoram was also at an all-time high.

The commission has the software that identified duplicate voters on the basis of parameters such as name, age, address and father’s name across India.
“The names of such voters were removed after home verification,” an official said.

The commission also conducted extensive visits to homes to find out whether those listed on the rolls were staying there or not. In Delhi alone, the names of about 13 voters were deleted from the list even though a large number of residents complained that their names were struck off wrongly.

In addition, the commission had launched Systematic Voter’s Education and Electoral Participation (SVEEP) with the help of civil society. As part of the programme, the commission ran audio-visual and live programmes to educate voters about the importance of electoral politics.

“The SVEEP was able to mobilise a large number of people for polls,” an EC official said.

High-decibel political campaigns in four states — Delhi, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh — and the entry of Aam Admi Party leader Arvind Kejriwal had also helped in a high voter turnout.

In Delhi, the Aam Aadmi Party created the political atmosphere much in advance, generating a lot of interest in the local population.

The Maoist attack on Congress leaders in the Bastar region in May this year has invoked a strong response from voters in the tribal belt, according to the Election Commission’s data.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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