A total of over 96.9 crore voters are registered across the country, EC said. More than 2 crore young electors, spanning the 18-19 and 20-29 age groups, have been added to the electoral roll
NEW DELHI:
Supreme Court
on Monday expressed full satisfaction with the work being done by Election Commission in preparing the final voter list for the coming general elections and said there was no room to accuse the poll supervisory body of not taking enough steps to weed out
duplicate
and ghost voters.
Appearing for EC, advocate Amit Sharma told a bench of CJI D Y Chandrachud, and Justices J B Pardiwala and Manoj Misra that generally people, especially the first time voters, are enthusiastic about registering their names in the voters list, but there is a discernible lack of effort on the part of electorate to help Election Commission in deleting duplicate entries and the names of the dead from voters list.
For this reason, Election Commission and a large contingent of booth level officers conduct house to house verification, he said.
“An IT-enabled system generates lists of probable Demographic Similar Entries (DSEs) & Photo Similar Entries (PSEs). House-to-House verification acts as an assistive tool for Electoral Registration officers (EROs)/AEROs, who must complete the process as defined in concerned Act & Rules,” he added.
As per the finally published electoral roll, a total of over 96.9 crore voters are registered across the country, EC said. More than two crore young electors, spanning the 18-19 and 20-29 age groups, have been added to the electoral roll.
After hearing Sharma, the bench disposed of a PIL, which had alleged that large-scale duplicate entries and ghost voters continue to exist on the voters list and had sought a direction to EC to eliminate them prior to the general elections.
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