Apr 24, 2015 - Vivek Bhavsar | Mumbai
Aiming to ‘clean up’ 24 lakh registered bogus voters in the electoral rolls, the Election Commission (EC) has decided to link voter ID cards with Aadhaar numbers. The drive began last month and after completion the EC will give voters the option to cast their franchise online. An official from the EC said that around 3,10,000 people from across the state had registered to link their Aadhaar cards with their voter IDs, while in Mumbai and Thane around 16,000 people have registered so far. “The largest number of people who have registered are from the Hingoli district (43,735), followed by Kolhapur (43,554),” the official said.
“We will hold special camps to create awareness on the benefits of registering to link Aadhaar and voter IDs. Once we achieve a 100 per cent result, we can even plan to give voters the option to cast their franchise online using a biometric system,” he added.
The EC is identifying bogus voter IDs from the system that will help in making the voter list transparent.
Before the Lok Sabha polls last year, the EC organised a systematic drive to register new voters. However, all political parties alleged that there were over a few thousand bogus voters registered during the drive.
“The EC is optimistic that Aadhaar-linked voter IDs will minimise the complaints,” said the official.
There are a total of 8,35,34,880 registered voters in the state, out of which 4,40,77,571 are males, 3,94,56,271 are females and 1,038 fall in the ‘Others’ category.
“The number of people who are above 18 years of age is around 8.7 crore. Thus, there is a disparity between the total number of people eligible to vote and the total number of voters. It means there are more than 28 lakh bogus voters present,” he said.
The voters can log in to the state election commission website: http://ceo.maharashtra.gov.in/AadhaarSeed/ to feed their Aadhaar numbers in the EPIC database.