Bengal SIR: Deadline for submission of claims, objections to draft voters’ list ends today
Kolkata: The deadline for submission of claims and objections to the draft voters’ list in West Bengal will end on Monday.
The deadline for submitting Forms 6 (for the inclusion of new voters’ names), 7 (for the deletion of voters’ names due to death or other reasons), and 8 (for the shifting of Assembly constituency or voter address) will also end on Monday.
Initially, the deadline for submitting claims and objections to the draft voters’ list was set for January 15, which was later extended until Monday. The exercise for hearings on claims and objections will continue till February 7, and the final voters’ list in the state will be published on February 14.
With less than a month left for both the completion of the hearings on claims and objections to the draft voters’ list in West Bengal as well as the publication of the final voters’ list, the Commission has now set a target to complete 7,00,000 hearings a day through 6,500 hearing centres scattered all over the state.
Till Sunday, the Commission had received 9,00,128 Form-6 applications, sources in the office of the Chief Electoral Officer (CEO), West Bengal said. Similarly, the number of Form-7 applications received by the Commission as of the same period is 1,41,847.
What is interesting is that the date available with the Commission totally contradicts the Trinamool Congress’s claim that a huge number of voters, who are alive, had been marked as “deceased” voters at the end of the enumeration stage, which was the first stage of the three-stage Special Intensive Revision (SIR) exercise.
According to the Commission’s records, the Trinamool Congress, as a political party, has submitted only 13 applications, in which voters who are alive have been incorrectly marked as deceased at the end of the enumeration phase.
The number of similar applications made by Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is just one.
The final voters’ list in West Bengal will be published on February 14. Thereafter, the full bench of the Commission will visit West Bengal, and soon after that, the ECI is expected to announce the polling dates for the crucial Assembly elections in West Bengal.
Recently, the Union Home Minister, Amit Shah, while interacting with the media persons in Kolkata, said the polling and counting will be over by the end of April this year.