Bengaluru, 4 August

Nearly one-fifth (19 per cent) of Karnataka’s electorate may be deleted during the ongoing Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls in the State, and they haven’t even been notified yet, a rights group has stated.

According to a release from the Election Commission to political parties on 3 August, a little over 1.10 crore voters have been marked as under the Absent, Shifted, Duplicate, Dead and Others (ASDDO) category. This would likely be one of the largest draft-stage deletions in India during the ongoing SIR exercise. Karnataka has around 5.54 crore registered voters.

People who are marked in the ASDDO category are supposed to contact their Booth Level Officers (BLOs) by 8 August and submit the required documents to ensure that they are not deleted. 

However, My Vote My Right stated on Tuesday that this is nearly impossible, because voters don’t even know if they might be deleted, as nobody has received SMS or writing intimations to indicate that they have been categorised under the ASDDO. 

“The ASDDO lists may be given to political parties and BLOs, but they are not being uploaded and updated on the website,” it stated. “An ordinary person has no way of checking the status of their Enumeration Form”.

Further, the group alleged that BLOs have been refusing to give out enumeration forms to some voters, saying that they have already been marked as “shifted”.

It noted that Chief Electoral Officer K Anbukumar has said that people may be wrongly categorised as ASDDO, but there are barely a few days left of the enumeration process.