A special campaign will be conducted to add eligible residents to the Bengaluru voter list, after 2.19 lakh people submitted applications for new enrolment, city district election officer and Greater Bengaluru Authority chief commissioner M. Maheshwar Rao said on Thursday.
The campaign is part of the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls. Rao said residents whose names were missing from the voter list need not panic and can apply for fresh enrolment using Form 6. The campaign is intended to identify eligible voters and complete the required verification process.
The draft electoral roll currently contains 56,99,660 voters in Bengaluru city district. Officials expect around two lakh additional voters to be included after applications submitted through Forms 6, 7 and 8 are processed and verified. The total number of voters in the city is therefore expected to reach approximately 59 lakh.
Officials said 24,06,044 people had to be issued notices for hearings because their names could not be traced in the 2002 electoral roll or because of other discrepancies. Most of these hearings have already been completed, Rao said. The Election Commission has also directed booth-level officers to visit residents’ homes and conduct verification instead of relying only on hearings, and officials are taking action accordingly.
The exercise also includes scrutiny of requests to delete names from the electoral roll. In Bengaluru city district, 5,549 applications were submitted under Form 7, of which 2,468 had been approved at the time of the briefing. The approved applications represented 44% of the total received.
Booth-level agents are allowed to submit a maximum of 10 Form 7 applications. Rao said applications exceeding that limit would be examined and acted upon according to the rules. In Malleshwaram, 1,103 Form 7 applications were rejected, while bulk applications submitted in other areas are also being reviewed.
The process is significant for Bengaluru because the city is handling a large volume of enrolment, deletion and correction requests across its electoral constituencies. The figures also show the administrative challenge of maintaining an accurate voter list in a city with a large and mobile population. The final additions will depend on the verification and disposal of the applications, rather than on the number of forms submitted alone.
Details of claims and objections received constituency-wise have been published for public reference on the Election Commission’s website and the Greater Bengaluru Authority’s official website. The relevant forms include Forms 9, 10, 11, 11A and 11B. Residents can access the information through voters.eci.gov.in and the Greater Bengaluru Authority website at bbmp.gov.in/home.
