In a massive exercise to cleanse the "inflated" voter list, the Election Commission (EC) is set to delete over 19.6 lakh voters' names from among the 8.35 crore registered voters across Maharashtra. Most of them are being removed due to duplicated records, says the commission.
Among them, 8.55 lakh names are from Mumbai suburban district, the largest in the state. This is followed by Thane district, from where nearly 2.53 lakh voters have landed in the proposed deletion list. From Mumbai city, over 21,000 names are proposed to be removed.
"Notices are being served to all these voters at their residential addresses in EC records. After receiving the responses, the names will be deleted," said a top official from the chief electoral officer, Maharashtra.
Duplication, shift of residence and deaths are the three prime reasons. Interestingly, the voters' list of Maharashtra has a whopping 28 lakh "surplus" names. As against the eligible 8.07 crore voters in the state, the EC has 8.35 crore names on record. This means that over 9 lakh duplicate names are still elusive and CEO Maharashtra's work is still half done.
Officials hope that they would trace the remaining 9 lakh names in one month. "Sorting out duplicate names, voters who have shifted and dead voters would continue till September-end. This is taking time as we are taking utmost precaution in compiling the deletion list to avoid any controversy," says the top official.
A final draft voter list (sans the inflated figures) is slated to be released on October 1, a deadline given by the EC. The EC has directed all states to release their draft voter lists on October 1.
The refreshed list will be helpful for the Mumbai and Thane civic polls, which are slated to be held early 2017.
The commission has started a similar exercise in 2013 just before the Lok Sabha elections, which courted a big controversy during the April-May 2014 polls, with hundreds of voters in Maharashtra, including some high-profile people complaining of their names missing from the voters' list.
The fiasco caused a huge embarrassment to the election watchdog and it led to a public apology from the top election official. Following this, the deletion exercise was stopped so as to avoid any fiasco during Assembly polls in the state, which were held six months later in October 2014.
Top five districts in deletion list
Mumbai suburb: 8.55 lakh
Thane: 2.53 lakh
Nashik: 1.72 lakh
Pune: 1.15 lakh
Latur: 1.01 lakh
Box: The goof-up
8:35 crore : Names on the voter lists as of now
8.07 crore: Actual number of voters in the state
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