Chennai: Admitting that the names of 17,510 non-resident/ dead persons have to be deleted from the voters list pertaining to the RK Nagar Assembly constituency, the Election Commission of India has informed the Madras high court that it proposes to conduct 100 per cent door to door verification in the constituency. Advocate Niranjan Rajagopalan, counsel for ECI, produced a letter from the Chief Electoral Officer before Justice K. Ravichandrabaabu, when the petition filed by the DMK organisation secretary R.S. Bharathi came up for hearing on Friday.
When the case came up for hearing, senior counsel P. Wilson appearing for the petitioner submitted that right from January 2017 representations were given by the DMK district secretary and despite pointing out that 43,861 bogus voters were found in the mother electoral roll published on January 5, and despite the election commission admitting that about 17,000 bogus voters were found in the electoral roll, the election commission has not taken any steps to purify the electoral roll. Out of the 2.6 lakh voters, nearly one-sixth of the voters were bogus and therefore the true will of the electorate will not be reflected if the election was conducted on the basis of the present electoral roll.
In view of restrictions contained in section 21 of the Representation of People Act, the revision can be done only before the by-election notification was announced and therefore the ECI should be restrained from notifying the election schedule, Wilson added. Niranjan submitted that the first bench has directed in a PIL to conduct elections before December 31 and therefore, this matter may be posted before the first bench. Reacting to this submission, Wilson said there were chances for ECI to announce the election schedule before the matter was heard by the first bench. Recording the letter produced by Niranjan and directing the registry to post the matter before the first bench, the judge said till such date, the respondent (ECI) ought not to precipitate the matter.
