Pune: With verification and marking of over 10.32 lakh suspected duplicate voter entries across 29 municipal corporations in Maharashtra still incomplete, the opposition has raised concerns over possible confusion at polling booths and the risk of bogus voting.Multiple voter entries refer to names that appear twice or even thrice on the electoral roll. To address this, the State Election Commission (SEC) had launched a special drive using a dedicated software to identify duplicate entries across all 29 municipal corporations going to the polls on Thursday.SEC data showed that of the nearly 23 lakh suspected multiple entries identified in electoral rolls across the state, around 10 lakh names continued to remain unmarked. The data showed that bigger civic bodies accounted for a substantial share of the pending work.Among the major municipal corporations, PMC has one of the highest pendencies, with 83.29% of suspected duplicate entries — amounting to nearly 2.5 lakh voter records — yet to be marked. In contrast, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) completed most of its verification process and has the lowest percentage of pending cases.Opposition leaders said govt should have completed the marking exercise well in advance and alleged that the delay could be misused. “The names should be clearly marked to avoid any ambiguity on the day of polling. With such a large number of unverified duplicate entries, there is a possibility of confusion and even bogus voting,” an opposition leader said, urging polling agents to maintain strict vigil at booths.SEC guidelines state that civic officials are required to conduct field-level verification by visiting voters whose names appear multiple times in the electoral rolls to determine if the entries belong to the same individual or different persons. If the entries pertain to different individuals, all names are to be retained. However, if they relate to the same person, officials must obtain a written undertaking from the voter and mark the preferred polling booth in the electoral roll.Officials said the exercise would help polling staff easily identify such cases at polling booths and prevent bogus voting. The verification drive was carried out across all municipal corporations as a part of preparations to ensure cleaner and more accurate voter lists.Opposition leaders urged polling officials and booth-level staff to be extra alert on polling day, particularly in areas with high numbers of unmarked entries to ensure that the electoral process remains free and fair and bogus voting is prevented.Claiming that “bogus voting was prevalent in the last assembly elections”, members of the opposition parties said they would step up vigil at all booths during Thursday’s polling to identify bogus voters.Congress’s Pune city chief Arvind Shinde said: “We have trained our polling agents to identify bogus voters, if they turn up at the booths. We have distributed among them copies of electoral rolls, with marking of duplicate names in the lists. We have also increased the number of party workers across all booths to keep an eye on the voting process till the end.”He told TOI: “Since every voter has to cast four votes each, it will be a time-consuming process. Increase in voting percentage in the last couple of hours of polling increases chances of manipulation. Keeping this in mind, our party workers are trying to convince people to cast their votes early in the day.”Shiv Sena (UBT) office-bearers have told their booth agents to raise complaints about any suspicion with election officials. Sanjay More, the party’s city unit chief, said: “Our booth agents have been told to scrutinise every voter’s documents for identification in detail. If the photograph is missing or there are discrepancies in documents, we have told them to immediately raise complaints with the election officials.”
