Panaji: Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) Goa President Valmiki Naik on Thursday demanded action against Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) Gyanesh Kumar over the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls, alleging that the exercise had undermined the authority of ground-level election officials.
Naik was reacting to a report stating that 97 voters in Goa, who had been found eligible for inclusion by Electoral Registration Officers (EROs), were left out of the final electoral roll following the SIR exercise.
According to The Indian Express, the EROs could not reverse the earlier deletion decisions because the centralised ECINet system did not provide them with a mechanism to restore the voters. The report stated that the Goa Chief Electoral Officer had sent multiple emails seeking a way to include the eligible voters.
Naik alleged that the incident showed how the powers of EROs had been undermined by the centralisation of the electoral roll process.
“First our lands were being stolen, now even our votes are being stolen,” Naik said, adding that the Goa case could be “just the tip of the iceberg”.
He further alleged that voters who do not support the BJP could be targeted through the deletion of their names from electoral rolls.
