NEW DELHI: Election Commission of India (ECI) Saturday extended the deadline for filing claims and objections and submission of Form-6 for re-inclusion into the electoral roll under Special Intensive Revision (SIR) in Delhi by a month, till Oct 30. The deadline for disposal of SIR notices and claims and objections has also been extended till Nov 30. The final electoral roll will now be published on Dec 4 instead of Nov 4.In a press statement, ECI stated that the dates were extended following a request from Chief Electoral Officer (CEO), Delhi. The decision was taken due to multiple reasons, including tepid response for re-inclusion, some “server issues delaying the processing of applications” and booth-level officers (BLOs) requesting more time for dealing with high workload, said Delhi election officials.The deadline for filing claims and objections was earlier Sept 30 and the last date for disposal was Oct 29. The extension comes nearly a month after the draft electoral roll was published on Aug 31, leaving out around 47.6 lakh registered voters from Delhi’s roll of about 1.5 crore.The draft roll contains around 97.5 lakh electors, out of which nearly 33 lakh people have been identified for issuance of SIR notices over logical discrepancies in their details such as spelling mismatches, less than nine months’ difference between dates of birth of siblings, and also for not being mapped with the 2002 SIR.TOI recently reported that only a fraction of those left out in the draft roll had submitted Form 6 seeking re-inclusion. According to the latest figures, 1,21,224 Form 6 applications were received between Aug 31 and Sept 24, which also include first-timers. Form 6 is submitted for including an eligible Indian’s name in the electoral roll.The district-wise data showed that South East recorded 11,864 Form 6 applications during the period, while West received 14,838. North West recorded 12,527 applications, East 12,094, North East 11,191 and South West 10,429.The 47.6 lakh voters whose names have been deleted from the draft roll have been categorised as Absent, Shifted, Dead, Duplicate and Others following a house-to-house verification exercise. Around 43.3 lakh of them were categorised as absent or shifted, while around 2.8 lakh were marked dead and 1.4 lakh as duplicate entries.Officials had attributed the deletion of names largely to voters having shifted from their registered addresses, with Delhi having a large number of tenants and migrant workers.The latest extension gives election officials more time to complete the verification and disposal process. The exercise has involved around 13,000 BLOs who carried out the door-to-door enumeration across Delhi’s 13 districts.
