More ghost voters discovered

CHENNAI: The opposition parties have been levelling allegations that there are several thousand ghost voters on the electoral rolls of

RK Nagar

constituency. A voter verification exercise carried out by TOI in ward 78 of RK Nagar gives credence to these charges.

In the exercise, 11 voters, whose names are on the electoral rolls, were found to be missing in the constituency as they no longer reside in RK Nagar. For instance, Umar Farooq, a resident of New Washermenpet, has shifted to the nearby constituency, but his name is still there on the rolls of RK Nagar constituency.

“I own a house in RK Nagar, but we are not living there. We vacated the place some time back and moved out of RK Nagar too,” Farooq told TOI. He had no clue as to why his name and those of his family members still figure on the RK Nagar electoral rolls.

Sources told TOI that at least 50 to 60 ghost voters figure on the electoral rolls of every booth. There are 256 booths in the constituency. An official in the state election department said, “Before the byelection, we will do door-todoor verification of voters’ list once again to weed out names of people who are dead and who have shifted to other places.” Already, the department has frozen 2,000 names on the voters’ list after verifying that those people do not reside in the constituency. “We will maintain a separate list of people who do not live in the constituency. They will not be allowed to cast vote on December 21,” said the official.

DMK Rajya Sabha

member

R S Bharathi

said the party cadres had done thorough verification of the rolls and found that names of many dead people and those who had shifted their residences to other places were still on the RK Nagar electoral rolls. The election commission is expected to delete such names during their door-to-door verification exercise. “Following this, we went to the Madras high court. So far, more than 45,000 names have been deleted. The court has asked the EC to delete all the names of people who are not living in the constituency. We will present more such names in the court on Monday.

“The best way to clean up the electoral rolls is to link the voter names with Aadhaar. We came to know that the EC has asked its officials to link Chennai voters’ lists with Aadhaar. Similarly, electoral rolls in all segments across Tamil Nadu must be linked with Aadhaar to prevent multiple entries and presence of dead people’s names on voters’ lists,” said Bharathi.