Voters can go to jail for giving false information

The Election Commission (EC) issued new guidelines on Sunday to create cleaner electoral rolls without duplication of names for the 2014 Lok Sabha polls. The new instructions also put the onus on the voter to provide correct and full information to poll officers. If the information given turns out to be false the voter can face up to one year in jail.

Updated on: Dec 16, 2013, 24:47:56 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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The Election Commission (EC) issued new guidelines on Sunday to create cleaner electoral rolls without duplication of names for the 2014 Lok Sabha polls. The new instructions also put the onus on the voter to provide correct and full information to poll officers. If the information given turns out to be false the voter can face up to one year in jail.

Under the new rules, election officers and the online registration system will no longer accept an application from a voter asking to be added on an electoral list until the person specifies whether he or she has voted or been on a voter list elsewhere.

If false information is provided, the election officers can penalise voters.

The EC has also directed that a voter’s name can only be removed from the electoral rolls after informing the concerned voter. The panel had come under heavy criticism in the recent Delhi assembly polls when names of thousands of Delhi residents were removed from electoral rolls without their knowledge. Nearly half of the voters in a colony in east Delhi did not figure on the voters’ list despite all of them having voter identity cards.

“No deletion can be made after publication of final rolls and it can be done only on basis of request for deletion,” the EC said.

New enrollments in voter lists for the coming general polls will start from January 1. Over 760 million people will be eligible to vote in the elections, according to the EC.

Having one name in multiple electoral rolls is a rampant problem in India.

Aap Aadmi Party (AAP) leader Arvind Kejriwal’s name was found in three different electoral rolls triggering a political storm. It was later found that Kejriwal had made valid declaration but the election officers had failed to delete his name from the other electoral rolls.

To curb the problem, the EC has asked electoral roll officers to match the new demographic details of new entrants and photographs using specialised software with the rolls of neighbouring areas.

“For example, for Delhi, de-duplication must be done with data pooled from other regions of the NCR including Noida, Ghaziabad and Gurgoan,” the EC said in its direction on Sunday, adding that similar exercises need to be undertaken in urban and rural areas near big cities.

The online registration system to enroll in a voters’ list has also been simplified. Providing a mobile number has also been made mandatory so that election officers can inform voters’ about their status through SMS.

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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