In the run up to the 2009 Lok Sabha elections, former HAL software en gineer PG Bhat formed Smart Votes, a not-for-profit organization to urge people to vote. While doing this, he and his friends realized the electoral rolls were full of errors.
“A woman was listed as male, a person who had been dead for years was still on the list, photos on voter ID cards were wrong… I could go on,” says Bhat, 65. In 2010, he wrote software that could detect obvious and logical errors in voter lists.
He paid Rs 2 per sheet to get the electoral rolls as per the rules, and began testing his software. “When lakhs of entries are made, errors are bound to creep in. Back then, the election office did not a system for verification. Even now, my software detects more errors than theirs,” he says.
For example, if a name appears twice, the age is below 18 or above 100, or the photo does not match the gender, the system throws up an alert. “I’ve found some patterns in the errors that can be fixed automatically. Other errors that the system cannot find or fix are detected by me, one by one,” he says.
Bhat looks after his grandson during the day while his daughter is at work, but once she is home after 5pm, he is at the computer cleaning up the electoral rolls. “At peak times, I have worked for 15 hours at a stretch,” Bhat says. He also gets requests from citizens to find their names on the electoral rolls and check if all their details are right. He complies cheerfully, and doesn’t charge anyone for his time or services.
He has asked the Karnataka election office to use his soft ware or adopt a similar one, but “every time I speak to the officers they insist that they don’t need it. They say their system is better though we all know it is flawed”, he says.
When Bhat did a detailed analysis of the voters’ list released recently ahead the BBMP poll, he found errors. “Such errors are a result of mistakes committed while making addition, deletion and corrections to the electoral list. There are more than 70 lakh voters in the 198 wards within the BBMP limits. The chief electoral officer (Karnataka) has said they deleted 58,110 names during the revision of the rolls. However, many of these deleted names are still in the voters’ rolls uploaded in the BBMP website,” he says.
According to Bhat, the errors could prove costly during the election. “Thousands of voters IDs don’t have the EPIC numbers. We also found that the gender of many voters is wrong and there are mistakes in the names. Voters will face problems when they go to exercise their franchise. The commission must take care while making entries as the continued presence of errors in the list would ultimately discourage genuine voters.And this is one of the reason why people don’t come out and vote,” he says.
source: http://www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com / The Times of India / News Home> City> Bengaluru / by Aparajita Ray, TNN / August 17th, 2015