Initiatives launched to enhance poll transparency: CEO

Chief Electoral Officer (CEO) Nandita Gupta announced here yesterday that the Election Commission (EC) had introduced several initiatives to enhance transparency, inclusiveness and efficiency in the election process. These measures have been categorised into six major areas: voters, political parties, procedural reforms, legal provisions, election personnel and administrative reforms.

Nandita said that to prioritise voter convenience, the maximum number of voters per polling station had been capped at 1,200 to prevent overcrowding. She added, “Additional polling stations will be established in multi-storey buildings and densely populated colonies. The process of removing the names of deceased voters from the electoral roll will be expedited.”

The officer said that to strengthen coordination with political parties, 4,719 all-party meetings were held across various administrative levels nationwide and over 28,000 political representatives had participated in these.

She said, “The EC has engaged in dialogues with national and state parties. Besides, training sessions for booth-level agents were organised at the India International Institute of Democracy and Election Management.”

Nandita said that a new ECINET dashboard had been introduced to consolidate all election services onto a single platform. She added that the issue of duplicate EPIC (voter identity card) numbers had been resolved, ensuring that each voter had a unique identification number.

She said, “Standard photo identity cards are being distributed to booth level officers to empower election personnel. So far, over 3,000 booth-level supervisors have received training.” She added that the first batch from Himachal Pradesh, including three District Election Officers, 12 Electoral Registration Officers and 68 block-level supervisors, was scheduled to undergo training on May 26 and 27.

Himachal Tribune