On election day in Hyderabad, I was involved in volunteering at polling stations for the whole day. This might be a useful experience for friends in new Andhra Pradesh which is about to got to polls in a day. Hence, sharing.

Who are we?

We are a team of 10-15 comprising of all TDP/BBB volunteers and sympathisers.

Problem

Voters in every polling station(PS) should be issued a voter slip by the election commission which gives snapshot of the polling station number, address and serial number. When we walk-in to a PS, our identity is checked based on the serial number and name. Once they find a match, we will be allowed to vote. Unfortunately, more than 50% of the voters haven’t got their voter slips in our locality. At every PS GHMC has deployed its personnel to issue voter slips manually for voters who might come for. They have the voter slips for the complete PS (varies from 1000-2000). Now every voter coming for voter slip and verification should be verified manually in the all those papers and issue voter slip if found.

What we did?

Prime goal – To make people vote by assisting in finding the PS and serial numbers. The more voting %, we see the better results.

For our constituency, Serilingampally Assembly & Chevella Parliament, we have gathered final electoral rolls for booths 200-300 from ceoandhra.nic.in. Merged all those individual PDF files into a single file.

We got equipped with laptops/tablets, data cards, pens and tons of paper. All the laptops and tablets were deployed with the above said PDF file. Teams were deployed at every PS in all the neighbouring areas. Covered few PS in mobile way, moving as and when necessary (read as chaos).

Each team constituted about a helper, searcher & writer. Team is spread

  • Helper – Reads out the search item (EPIC number/name/address) to the searcher.
  • Searcher – Swiftly searches the given EPIC number in the consolidated electoral roll.
  • Writer – Writes down polling station number and sequence number in a slip and gives it to the voter. 1 writer is enough for 2-3 searchers.

If a voter walks-in with their voter ID, we key in the ID and search in the consolidated electoral roll PDF. Not only the voter ID, We did search by Address, Name even. At times, when there is breathing time, we even searched by the application ID and other PS data (apart from those 100).

For the whole day we served hundreds of voters from every polling station. We took turns to take a break. It was highly successful and our efforts paid off in increasing voting at PS level and thereby constituency level.

Over all, it was a nice experience and a perfect team work. Everyone in the team dedicated themselves wholeheartedly for the cause. This kind of service is necessary(more in urban) even for new AP elections. Whole experience for me is a good case study on voter and poll management in general elections.

Here are few interesting observations

  • Unlike rural areas which has mere 1 or 2 polling stations, Urban centres have more number of polling stations and voters of a locality can be spread across multiple PS within few kilometres.
  • No guarantee that every voter in a family should be in a single PS.
  • PS & Serial numbers of voters change every time the electoral rolls are generated by election commission.
  • Voter slips are distributed only when the voters address is within reach to the polling station. When you are few KMs away, they don’t care to distribute them.
  • There are genuine reasons for Hyderabad voting percentage being low. Few are
  • When people move from one location to other (happens mostly in cities like Hyd), they apply new cards and old cards are left alone resulting in duplicate cards.
  • Voter unable to find their vote due to frequent changing of PS and serial numbers.
  • EC is very ill-equipped in voter slip distribution, data purification.
  • Pathetic voter application data entry by EC. This results in re-application and re-issue or voter leaving PS as they couldn’t find their given name.
  • In Hyd, no one cross checks the photograph on Voter card to the actual person who has come to vote. Not even PS agents.
  • Many apply for voter card and they don’t follow-up on the status until the D-day
  • Despite huge publicity to check through SMS, website or walk-in, many employees come to PS and search for names.
  • Few voters from different and distant PS have come to our camp to find out their missing votes.
  • Many are not aware that a long beep and red light is confirmation for a vote recorded.
  • I had an argument with a PS officer who almost let a woman to leave the PS even when vote isn’t recorded. After my protest, she was asked to come back and asked to vote properly.
  • More than ballot voting, with EVM, it requires strict manual supervision.
  • User experience of an EVM is not on par with the ballot system. It still requires to evolve in a fool proof way.
  • Surprisingly, EC/GHMC staff assisting voters to distribute voter slips are not allowed to vote, even through postal ballot.
  • When cops asked us to move out by the end of the day, GHMC staff intervened and explained them about our necessity to be near PS.