PUNE: Many cases of names missing from the voters’ list were reported across the city on Friday during the third phase of polling for Lok Sabha elections. Many of these voters have been casting their votes in their respective areas for over a decade. They expressed their disappointment to Sakal Times as they had to run from pillar to post to find their names in the voters’ list.
“For past 40 years, our voting centre has been here at the St Mira’s Primary School, Sadhu Vaswani Chowk. This is the first time that our names have not appeared in the voting list. For the first time, we have missed polling. Some of our friends also could not vote as their names were missing from the list,” said Chanda Page, who had come with her husband Dilip Page to vote at the school.
Some voters from the Camp area also had a similar complaint. Anjum Shaikh who had come to the Pune Cantonment Board-run Rabindranath Tagore English Medium School was disappointed after she learnt that her name wasn’t there in the list. “Most of our family members had their voting centre here. We have been casting our vote here for the past 10 years. But this year our names are missing from the list. Of the 10 voters in my family, only three could cast their vote. When we enquired at the help desk about the missing names, they told us to check online. We tried but the online server was down. It was highly exhausting for us. What are we supposed to do?” Shaikh questioned.
A visibly irked Husain Poonawala who had come with his mother Shirin Poonawala went through the same trauma. “I don’t understand the relevance of our voter IDs. Earlier, our voting centre was on Booty Street, but after the Sewage Treatment Plant came up, our names have shifted to this school. But I couldn’t find our names in the list,” said Poonawala.
Similarly, at the K Sopanrao Baburao Katke Primary School near Bhairavnath Mandir, Baner, Babsy Bilimoria was not able to find her name in the list at the school.
The same situation was faced by Daneesh Sethna. He said, “I have been voting here for the past several years. Now, the election officers said my name is not in the list. They told me to check my name at the commissioner’s office. There was no cooperation at all by the officers.”
Surekha Banjar, another hassled voter, said, “My name is registered as three different names in the list. I have three different polling booths to vote. I went to these polling booths, where the polling staff said that it is not valid. Now, I am confused over what to do about it.”
Sanjeevkumar Patil, Director, Wagholi Housing Society Association, said, “Voter ID cards distribution in Wagholi is in a mess as most of the voter cards were not available. There were only issuing voter slips with the photo along with booth level officers’ phone numbers - 240, 260, 255 etc were not available.”
EVM GLITCHES
- Cases of EVM malfunctioning were reported from some parts of the city.
- A voting machine at the Sundarbai High School, Wadgaon Sheri was not working. It took almost one hour to restore the machine.
- Similarly, in Kothrud area there was another incident of EVM malfunctioning in the Bhartiya Shikshan Sanstha. It took around half an hour to repair the machine.
