Kolkata, February 19 – With just three days left for the deadline for scrutinizing voter documents submitted during the hearings on claims and objections regarding the draft voter list, around 20 lakh voter documents are pending re-verification by the District Magistrates, who are also the District Electoral Officers (DEOs).
Sources in the office of the Chief Electoral Officer (CEO), West Bengal, said that the majority of these documents pending re-verification by the DEOs are cases of "logical discrepancies."
"The micro-observers noticed abnormalities in these documents during the ongoing scrutiny phases. In such cases, the documents submitted by the concerned voters did not match the 13 documents mandated by the Election Commission of India as authentic identity documents. Based on the recommendations of the micro-observers, these documents were returned to the DEOs for re-verification. The Commission had also directed the DEOs to complete the re-verification process and report back to the Commission at the earliest," sources in the CEO's office said.
At the same time, the CEO's office sources added that around 1.14 lakh voter documents submitted during the hearings have not yet been uploaded into the system, and therefore, the scrutiny process for these documents has not yet started.
"Given these two developments, it is doubtful whether the deadline of completing the scrutiny process by February 21 will be met. It is likely that the deadline for completing the scrutiny process will have to be extended again, and if that happens, the date for publishing the final voter list may have to be postponed again," said the sources in the CEO's office.
According to the current schedule, the final voter list is scheduled to be published on February 28, which was previously fixed on February 14.
On March 1, the full bench of the Commission is expected to arrive in West Bengal for a two-day visit to assess the situation in the post-SIR scenario. Soon after that, the Commission is expected to announce the polling dates for the crucial Assembly elections in West Bengal, which are scheduled later this year.
This time, the Commission is planning to conduct the polls in a much smaller number of phases than in the previous elections. The CEO's office had already recommended a single-phase poll, while maintaining that the final decision in the matter will be taken by the Commission.
The last time a single-phase poll was conducted in West Bengal was in 2001.
