Fifty-four percent of Bangalore‘s eligible voters showed up at the polls on April 17, a disappointing number considering the high turnout in some states. I was not among them, but it was not for lack of trying. Despite doing everything correctly, my application never went through.
I was 18 the last time India held national elections. Since then, we moved around a lot. I was looking forward to voting this year for the first time. A record number of people are registered to vote in this election, and the country is at a crossroads as it considers whether to kick out the Gandhi-Nehru dynasty and its Congress party in favour of the Bharatiya Janata Party and prime ministerial hopeful Narendra Modi, or perhaps a third front of other parties.
I was eager to include my voice in the nation’s decision. I filled out the forms and gave copies to volunteers in the Reuters Bangalore newsroom who submitted the applications to the Election Commission. Voters’ names are supposed to appear on the electoral rolls six weeks after submission. The deadline for applications to reach the Election Commission was March 16. Voting day in the state of Karnataka where I live was April 17. I checked my application status online on April 15 and saw that it was still “under process”.
I called the Electoral Registration Officer that day to ask why I wasn’t registered yet. An officer there told me to call my ward office to confirm that it went through because it might not necessarily reflect online. I asked an official at my local area ward office what was happening. He said that if the Election Commission hadn’t processed my application yet, it was probably too late for me to vote. When I asked why this happened, he said that it could be because Election Commission officials either lost my application or didn’t have time to process it. At that point, another worker there said that I should go home and wait for the voting slips that the commission distributes 48 hours before polling. If I didn’t get it, then it was too bad for me.
I do not know how many people encountered the same problem, but I know that I am not the only one in Bangalore. Meanwhile, in other cities, including Pune and Mumbai, people found that their names were missing.
Yashas Mitta, a Bangalore-based executive at design firm Creativeland Asia, saw that his name was not on the list. His mother’s name was, but someone had voted in her place. “When I asked the officials, they told me that they had received the list of people who had registered before January. Anybody who registered after that didn’t find their names on the list. And this is funny because the registration was open until March.”
Ankit Baphna, a 33-year-old IT consultant in Bangalore, also did not find his name on the list. His local ward office wasn’t helpful. The Bangalore Bruhat Mahanagara Palike, or Bangalore municipal corporation, told him, “you can vote in next elections,” Baphna wrote in a Facebook post.
Amulya Nagaraj, a former Reuters reporter who lives in southern Bangalore, found her name struck from the list. “When I asked the reason, they said that these kinds of things happen, that sometimes names are removed from the list,” she said.
via They say every vote counts, but mine wasn’t | India Insight.
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