Chennai: The Madras high court has directed the Election Commission of India to give suitable reply to the representation made by the DMK, which sought to remove the authenticated photo voter slip from the list of identity documents for exercising vote in the ensuing state assembly election.
A division bench comprising Justices M. M. Sundresh and S. Vimala disposed of a petition filed by DMK represented by its press relations secretary T.K.S.Elangovan.
The bench said, “The matter like this have to be left to the discretion of the respondents (EC). Admittedly the notification has come into force. Therefore, we do not go into the merits of the matter, except by calling upon the EC to give suitable reply to the representation made by the petitioner”.
According to the petitioner, during the Lok Sabha general election, while the model code of conduct was in force, on March 21, 2014, the ECI framed guidelines to print and distribute Photo Voter Slips (PVS) for registered voters and instructed all CEOs to distribute the same at least five days prior to the date of poll. On April 2, 2014, the ECI issued order including this PVS with the nomenclature of “Authenticated Photo Voter Slip” as 11th identity document in addition to existing 10 other alternate identity documents facilitating those who were not able to produce Electors Photo Identity Cards (EPIC), to cast their votes.
These PVS were directed to be distributed through booth level officers, who were very easily amenable to the local body representatives belonging to political parties. Since the BLOs were local people and their jobs were at the mercy of the ruling or other political party local body representatives, they will have no choice except to act according to the directions of the political bosses.
They, out of fear, simply hand over these undistributed PVS to the ruling or the other political party local body representatives and report to the ROs they had distributed all the PVS to voters. There was no proof method of ensuring 100 percent distribution of PVS and to rule out any foul play. This will lead to bogus voting, he added.
