Names of 3m bogus voters deleted from Uttar Pradesh rolls

New Delhi: The Election Commission yesterday took the first step towards holding provincial polls in politically sensitive Uttar Pradesh.

After a tedious exercise to weed out bogus voters, the EC finally published the revised electoral rolls meant to be used during the upcoming assembly elections likely to be held in April.

Names of over 3 million bogus voters have been deleted during scrutiny and a total of 114.4 million voters have been found eligible to vote for the 403-member state assembly. Among them are 1.7 million youth who crossed the mandatory 18 years of age last year.

The EC was originally scheduled to publish the electoral rolls on January 3. The process, however, had to delay due to allegations about presence of a large number of bogus voters.

"Our teams discovered that names of long dead or those who had shifted out of their registered addresses continued to exist. In addition, our teams also discovered names of non-existent persons in the voters list," a senior official of the Election Commission said.

The Election Commission had deferred Uttar Pradesh polls while finalising schedules for three election-bound states, namely Punjab, Uttara- khand and Manipur in order to ensure a free and fair election. The Commission had earned kudos for holding free and fair elections in equally sensitive states of Bihar and West Bengal last year after taking tough measures like deleting names of bogus voters and deploying central forces to conduct elections.

The EC used services of 21 central observers to oversee the process and they visited the state twice before completing the tedious job.