EC flooded with 18,500 complaints

CHENNAI: Seventy-five-year-old V Sivagami walked from booth to booth in Mandaveli, umbrella in hand, in a frantic search to find her name on the electoral rolls on Monday. Her son being unwell, the senior citizen had to travel on her own and caught a bus from Tiruvanmiyur to Mandaveli to cast her vote.
"I missed receiving the voter slip since I recently shifted out of Mandaveli.I thought showing my ID would be enough but when I went to the booth I usually vote in, my name wasn't there and I was told to go to another booth," said Sivagami who met with the same treatment in at least four polling centres before she decided to head back home disappointed.
The election commission may have made several attempts to get the paperwork of voters in order prior to the elections but that didn't stop a flood of complaints pouring in on Monday.
The commission received as many as 18,500 complaints from across the state on polling day- a majority of them pertaining to booth slips and names missing from electoral rolls.
The Chennai Corporation also received 80 complaints on Monday, 70 per cent of which related to missing names.
Some voters failed to verify if their names were on the final voter list, an oversight which turned out to be costly. N Ganesan of Mylapore went into the polling booth on Royapettah High Road only to be denied entry.
"My wife was able to vote in the morning even though she had not verified her name. But my name is missing from the list. I had even voted in the last election," said a visibly upset Ganesan. He waited at the booth for about three hours, making calls to corporation and poll officials, pleading for a solution. Dr Akila Ravikumar, a resident of Nehru Nagar, Adyar, also found herself in the same boat. "I called the election helpline number '1950' but there was no explanation given," she said.
Complaints were also received regarding a mismatch between the names and photos on the list due to which voters were unable to exercise their franchise.
"I've been voting for the last two decades and I haven't really had a problem. This time when I went, I found my name on the list but with someone else's photo. So, I couldn't vote," said K Sridhar, a retired insurance agent in Pudur, Ambattur. He said there was no one who could help him rectify the mistake. A few questioned the lack of enquiry counters near polling stations.
A senior corporation official said, while flying squads were deployed in every constituency to ensure there was no poll violation, they were helpless when it came to names being missed. "Although we have been trying to digitize the process, a part of it is still manual, so errors could happen. In some cases, people had to be guided as they were in the wrong booth," he added.