Mumbai: Congress claims over nine lakh bogus voters

Mangaloretoday News Network

Mumbai, Jan 17, 2019 : Raising questions over the voter enrolment process in Mumbai, the Congress on Wednesday alleged that over nine lakh bogus voters had been enlisted in the city’s voter rolls, Yahoonews reported.

 

The allegations, raised by Mumbai Congress president Sanjay Nirupam, come at a time when the Election Commission (EC) is in the process of finalising the draft rolls ahead of the Lok Sabha polls.

Alleging that there were instances where up to 13 election identification (voter ID) cards had been issued in different names to the same person, Nirupam alleged that the bogus enrolment work was being done systematically by an organised mafia. He demanded that the EC and the local election officials should immediately look into the matter. "In some cases, the same person is shown under two different names, with differing ages, residing at two addresses and linked to different voting booths within the same constituency," Nirupam said.

The party alleged that in each of the assembly segments in Mumbai’s six Lok Sabha seats, there were about 1.25 to 1.5 lakh bogus voters.

It also cited instances, where using a private software, it had screened the electoral rolls of certain constituencies. Giving the example of two sample Assembly belts, both represented by the Shiv Sena, Nirupam said: "We screened 638 voter IDs in the Magathane Assembly (Mumbai North Lok Sabha constituency). Only 182 of these were found to be genuine. Similarly, in the Dindoshi segment (Mumbai North West constituency), only 290 out of 552 sampled voter IDs were found to be genuine.

" The EC has assigned the responsibility of pruning and finalising the voter rolls to district collectors. Nirupam said close to 15,000 names of bogus voters were recently deleted from three Assembly belts - Anushakti Nagar, Mankhurd and Chanpali.

The EC plans to finalise the draft electoral rolls by January 31.