Family members scattered across draft SIR voter roll will be brought together, says Chief Electoral Officer

After the draft electoral roll under the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) was published in the State on December 23, many families have found it hard to track down their own kin. This is because, on the roll, they are either scattered within the same polling station or across multiple stations. But if things pan out, these voters will be regrouped under the same polling stations.

According to election officials, such dispersals occurred primarily on account of the adjustments made to limit the number of voters to 1,200 per polling station in line with an Election Commission of India (EC) decision. The EC decision was meant to avoid long queues on polling days.

The situation where members of the same family being dispersed across polling stations or being listed apart from each other in the same stationhas also made it difficult for political parties to examine the draft roll and track down voters, political parties informed Chief Electoral Officer (Kerala) Rathan U. Kelkar at the weekly political party meeting on SIR here on Saturday.

Mr. Kelkar said steps will be taken to regroup scattered members of such families under one polling station. “We will identify such people who are scattered and re-serialise and regroup them as a family under one polling station,” he said.

The EC has 25,468 polling stations in Kerala at present. With the voter population being limited to 1,200 per station, steps have been taken to add a little over 5,000 more polling stations.

Mr. Kelkar’s office is also preparing to publish the details of which voters have been transferred from one polling station to another as part of the rearrangement of polling stations.