AIADMK seeks linking of Aadhar with EPIC to weed out mistakes in the voter's list

CHENNAI: The AIADMK has demanded that the Election Commission consider linking Aadhar with the EPIC to avoid confusion in the voter list, while the DMK has demanded that prior permission for political party advertisements be provided within 24 hours.

A suggestion to this effect was made at the meeting of the recognised national and state political parties held by the chief electoral officer on Monday.

Senior AIADMK leader D Jayakumar said that of the six crore voters in the state, four crore voters have linked their Aadhar with the EPIC. “Even though it is not mandatory to link Aadhaar, if the voter’s ID and the Aadhaar are linked it will weed out various issues including photo mismatch, deletion and removal of the deceased person's names,” he said.

Despite the numerous complaints given to the commission, the issues on the voter’s list were not sorted out yet, he said. “We have been suggesting to the commission to make use of the technology in removing the names of deceased persons from the voter’s list by getting details from the local bodies. But no action has been taken on it,” he said.

Jayakumar also alleged that there are two voters’ lists circulated one for the political parties and the presiding officers of the polling booths. “The names of the voters will be in the voting list with the political parties but when they went inside the booths their names would be marked as deleted in the list with the presiding officer,” he said.

DMK organising secretary RS Bharathy said that if political parties apply for advertising in TV or social media to get prior approval to the committee set up by the Election Commission, it takes five days to one week to get approval. “It is an unwanted delay. The committee should be in the CEO's office. Permission should be given in 24 hours,” he told reporters.

BJP state vice president Karu Nagarajan said that voters face confusion over the polling booths as they were forced to visit different booths for different elections. “All the elections should be held at the same booth. Voters should not be forced to visit different booths for the local body polls, assembly and parliamentary polls,” he said.

He also pointed out that the election commission shares the list of the newly added voters before the release of the final voters list but the information on the deleted voters were not shared. “We demanded the commission to share the deleted voters list,” he said.