The Election Commission today begins a pilot project to update the electoral roll of two places, aiming to gather experience for launching a countrywide voters' roll updating campaign in August for the next general elections.
The pilot project will collect information about the people who will turn 15 in August through door-to-door visits.
Election commissioner M Sakhawat Hussain on Monday said the pilot project would be implemented in Kaliganj upazila of Gazipur district and Potnitola upazila of Naogaon to gather responses of the voters.
He said the new voters would have to provide some additional information, like the national identity card numbers of their parents, for enrolment. 'The additional information will have to be collected through door-to-door visits,' he added.
Based on the experience of the pilot project, the commission will decide whether to collect information about the already registered voters by filling in the forms anew or to gather information about the new voters only during the fully-fledged voters' roll updating campaign, said an official of the EC secretariat.
The EC will also consider whether to collect or not some additional information about the 8.57 crore voters already registered in the fresh forms during the campaign.
The typos in names in the national ID cards, however, will not be corrected.
The commission is planning to collect information about the people who will turn 18 in January 2014 so that there remains no need for further updating of the electoral roll before the next parliamentary polls, officials at the EC secretariat said.
The commission is legally bound to start updating the electoral roll on January 2 every year and also to update it before every general election.
Although the list of the people who turned 18 on January 1, 2011 and became eligible to be voters and the list of the people who had died till that date should have already been updated but the commission did not begin the task by the time specified in the law.
More than 10 lakh prospective voters were denied their franchise in the union council polls as the EC had failed to start updating the voters' roll on January 2 this year.
Around 13 lakh new voters and about the same number of left-outs had been enrolled every year in the past in accordance with the last updates.
The commission stopped registering voters after updating the voters' roll in July to November 2009, except enrolling the people who badly needed national identity cards as voters on special considerations.
Source : New Age
