Election Commission grapples with Form 7 apps

Amaravati: The Election Commission is faced with a huge task of scrutinising over 8 lakh forms seeking deletion of voters in Andhra Pradesh. Majority of these forms have been filed by the YSRCP activists.

According to Gopalakrishna Dwivedi, CEO of Andhra Pradesh an investigation is underway and the police is gathering IP addresses to identify those who filed large number of Form 7 applications. These applications will be verified to find out their genuineness.

It is learnt that about 45,000 staff are busy verifying these eight lakh applications. So far about 1.61 lakh have been checked and only 5,309 have been found to be genuine. This exercise of verification of the forms would take another five days.

The CEO said that “Deletion cannot be done just by a Form-7 request. There will be three levels of verification. The persons whose names figure in the form will be given one week notice and a proposal would be sent to the Election Commission from the district collector and then they will take up the issue of verification.

Guntur and Chittoor, which also happens to be Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu’s constituency, were one of the areas with high number of requests.

An interesting part in this never before kind of a phenomena that is being witnessed in Andhra Pradesh, is that there are allegations that names of many voters from Telangana who reside in the border villages have been incorporated in the voters list recently.

Several people belonging to Veerulapadu mandal of Krishna district staged a dharna in front of the MRO office alleging that voters with TS Aadhaar cards have been enrolled as AP voters. Officials said a probe into this would also be ordered.

It is also being alleged that Dhone YSR Congress party MLA and PAC chairman, Buggana Rajendranath Reddy is also involved in eliminating the names of TDP loyalists from the voter list. He is said to have uploaded the names of the candidates by filling in Form-7 from the net centres in Dhone town. The Election Commission on receiving the alarming number of applications from one constituency has ordered a probe.

Dhone constituency has a voter’s strength of 1.98 lakh. Of them around 2,300 applications have been uploaded at the net centres for eliminating the names from voter list. Of the 2,300 applications, 70 per cent names belong to a single community, it is alleged.