The Election Commission (EC) starts correcting the mistakes in the updated voter list today through door-to-door visit by its staffs to detect the fake and duplicate names in the list, allocating eight days for the task as per the EC’s latest decision.
Amidst widespread allegations that the updated voter list contains over one crore ‘excess’ voters, the EC on Tuesday decided to correct the mistakes by sending its staffs for door to door visit in only three days — December 8 to 10.
As per the latest decision, the field level staffs will visit door to door till December 15. Earlier, it took 22 days to complete the field level task in updating the voter roll without checking the authenticity of information with the same manpower.
Around 1.4 lakh staffs, mostly temporarily recruited, who worked for updating the electoral rolls, will visit door to door to detect fake and duplicate names in the updated list. They will also collect information with the prescribed forms about the prospective voters.
The EC Secretariat has already directed the field level election officers to start the task while EC Secretary Abdur Rashid Sarkar yesterday sought cooperation from all political parties and non-government organisations to properly complete the task.
The EC secretary yesterday afternoon held a meeting with the senior officials of the ministries of education and primary and mass education and Dhaka City Corporation (DCC) to gear up the field level task for correcting the mistakes in the updated voter list.
The EC Secretariat also assigned its 90 officials to monitor the field level task at 90 wards under the DCC.
The EC that declined to initiate any extensive step to make the voter list credible from the beginning, finally responded to the council of advisers’ advice following the National Democratic Institute’s (NDI) survey report on Saturday revealing that a total of 1.22 crore names on the updated list are either excess or duplicate.
The EC in last August completed updating the existing voter list and came up with a list containing a staggering 9.30 crore voters, which triggered a wave of controversy over its correctness. It contained at least 1.28 crore unaccounted voters following the 2001 census report of Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS).
On the basis of the 2001 BBS report, there were 8.02 crore people eligible to be registered as voters when the EC conducted voter list updating this year.




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July 5th, 2008 at 10:37 am
How can we check our viter list in Internet?