Returning officers of the Election Commission (EC) gave back a perplexed lot after conducting “home voting” in many constituencies, where they could not supervise to locate several voters upon visiting their homes.
As per the figures till Monday evening, 649 home voters in Rajasthan stayed untraced. Out of those 108 were differently abled voters, while almost 541 voters were over the age of 80.
In the 19 election constituencies of Jaipur district, 85 such voters were untraceable.
“Voters who are unable to come to the polling booths or voters who need to be accompanied by someone to reach polling booths have been selected for home voting.
Booth Level Officers (BLOs) were assigned to visit the homes of each and every applicant and should have inspected the presence of such voters physically before making the final selection. We are not confident how so many voters remain untraceable,” said the returning officer of a constituency.
Officials said that there had also been cases where they found the residences of selected voters to be shut. A few cases came up where family members told that the voters had been shifted to hospitals.
There were even cases where neighbours told that the whole family had gone to a relative’s place to attend a marriage function etc.
A polling officer of a constituency said, “We can guarantee you that we had actually gone to the homes of such voters many times earlier. Yet, we could not trace many of them,”
Chief electoral officer of Rajasthan, Praveen Gupta said “The positive side is that 98 percent of home voters had cast their votes because of this home voting pact. In any general election it is hard to see such a high percentage of polling”.
As far as the total figures till Monday are concerned, 60,977 voters cast their votes out of a total of 62,528 such voters. In the 19 districts of Jaipur, ECI had appointed 7,230 voters for home voting. Out of them, 7,050 voters cast their votes.
