Meeting Minutes of the Chief Electoral Officer about getting Voter ID card Problems in Slum level and Homeless People

Venue: Chief Electoral Office
Date: 30 August, 2012; 12:30 – 1:30 pm

Participants at the meeting:
From the CEO’s office:
· Dr. C S Suranjana, CEO
· Mr. R Manoj, Jt. CEO & Special Officer (Elections)
·Mr. Shamaiah.T, Joint CEO
·Mr Kulkarni P.T, Dy. CEO
From the KEW Committee:
· Mr K Sreedhar Rao, Chief Secy of Assam (Retd) and Advisor, KEW
· Prof Trilochan Sastry, ADR/NEW
· Mr Santosh P. Nargund, Rashtrotthan Sankalp
· Mr Veeresh, representing Ms. Kathyayani C., CIVIC
· Mr S. Gopal, RWA (to present voter registration problems)
· Mr Harsha H, Rashtrotthan Sankalp (to present Voter awareness material)
· Rosmin- ADR/NEW
· Tanvi-ADR/NEW

KEW representatives informed the CEO about the constitution of the election watchdog, KEW, for the upcoming Assembly elections in Karnataka and tried to understand the initiatives of the EC in recent times to facilitate fair elections. The KEW then presented certain chronic problems in voter registration and sought solutions and cooperation from CEO to resolve the same. The details of the discussion are as follows:

Voter Registration
· Polling Booths have been rationalized to have about 1300 voters per booth
· Registration (inclusion of name in electoral rolls) is now enabled at booth level with booth level officers (BLOs). These BLOs may be schools teachers or some other government officers.
· There are about 46,000 BLOs now across Karnataka
· The EROs or the Revenue Officers have the list of BLOs; the list is not available on CEO website as the names and contact details of BLOs may change with transfer, etc. of BLOs quite dynamically.
· The organization of Electoral Registration Officers (EROs) is as follows: District Electoral Officer (DEO) > Assistant DEO (ADEOs) > EROs (Revenue Officers) > Asst. EROs > BLOs
· At the BBMP level, the Commissioner, BBMP is now designated as the DEO, assisted by 4 ADEOs, then followed by EROS, AEROs and BLOs.
· One Voter Facilitation Centre (VFCs) is now functioning in each Assembly Constituency where the citizens can go and register to include their names in Electoral rolls.
· Supporting documents for applications made online on the CEO website may be submitted by hand at the respective VFCs, including in bulk.
· Applications to include names in Electoral rolls may now be submitted to either a BLO, AERO, ERO, online on the CEO website or at the VFC
· The CEO recommends making online application submissions of forms for inclusion of names in rolls to avoid problems involved in manual submissions.
· Voluntary Organisations may facilitate online application submission and hand over supporting documents by post or in bulk to VFCs by hand
· New format of Form-6 for manual submission of forms for name inclusion in rolls is available at http://164.100.80.163/ceokarnataka/Forms/Form6.pdf
· KEW members explained the hardships faced by people who don’t have address proofs or whose applications are rejected arbitrarily by Revenue officer

The various documents acceptable as residence proofs are listed in the Form-6 itself and include LPG bill, post paid mobile bill, rent / tenancy agreement or in the worst scenario an affidavit stating the present address. The following residence proofs may be attached with the forms.

October 16, electoral rolls to be opened for next revision to the voters in Bangalore and on Oct 1, for the other districts of Karnataka; KEW requested the CEO that this information should be released to the media such that people are aware that the registrations are open.

At the end of the registration period, all applications will be put online for scrutiny till the next revision period. The citizens get 7 days to scrutinize their forms / register objections before they are accepted and publicized.

Considering most problems in voter registration are at the Revenue Officer’s level, members of KEW requested the CEO to fix the time-limits to accept the applications for name inclusion and also include this service under Sakaal (Karnataka Guarantee of Services Act-KGSA); However, the CEO did not commit it considering the EC was an autonomous body and not a part of the government.

· The CEO informed that the honorarium paid to each BLO is Rs 3000 p.a. Voter Awareness
· material disseminated by the Electoral Office should have the sanction and approval of the Election Commission of India.

· While the CEO office has been disseminating information during information through outreach activities, Booth Level Officer training, docu-drama and skits, KEW can help in disseminating this information as well.

· The main aim to achieve via voter education should be to ensure that the corrupt and criminal candidates do not contest elections and that the voter chooses the clean candidates. The messages need to be neutral along the above mentioned lines.

· The EC has recently issued directions to candidates to make a 1-page summary of their educational, criminal and assets declarations in their affidavits. KEW requested that this 1-page summary of each candidate must be displayed outside the polling booths for information of citizens. Also, these 1-page abstracts must be published in local editions of newspapers of each constituency/district. The media, especially the regional media should be tapped. The information from these one page summaries can be released in the form of pull outs with the regional papers in accordance with the Election Commission’s budget. To this the CEO responded saying that it could be done if EC issues directions to this effect and releases budget for it.