8.8% votes rejected as graduates unaware of council poll process

MUMBAI: Lack of awareness about the voting process among the most literate voters has resulted in a high number of rejected votes in the graduates’ and teachers’ constituencies that went for polls early this week. Most of the votes were rejected due to faulty marking.

In Mumbai graduates’ constituency, the rejected votes were as high as 8.85%, while 5.08% of graduates’ votes were counted invalid. In the graduates’ constituencies, 3,299 voters of the 37,237 votes polled were rejected in Mumbai, while 425 votes were rejected of the total 8,353 votes polled in Mumbai teachers’ constituency.

Shirish Mohod, deputy chief election officer, said, “The ballot papers had clear instructions about the voting procedure. We had also issued advertisement for voters’ awareness.”

The voters had to cast their vote in preferential pattern by writing numbers in English as per their candidate preference. Though the election had party candidates, there was no party symbol allowed on the ballot paper.

“Voters were supposed to write the number of preference (eg. 1 for first preference and so on) against the candidates. But most of them wrote the candidate’s serial number against their names, while some others wrote the number in Marathi, Hindi or Urdu. Some of them put ‘X’ or tick mark sign instead of numbers, while some others chose to put the number in brackets,” an election official involved in conducting the polls said.

The official said to weed out the complexity in the process, election commission (EC) should use Electronic Voting Machine (EVM) and adopt a simple majority system. The official also said candidates with serial number 1 benefited the most as many voters mistakenly wrote the number.

Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) Niranjan Davkhare had serial number 1 on the ballot paper in Konkan graduates’ constituency. Shiv Sena’s Sanjay More from the same constituency wrote to the EC stating that votes rejected for writing his serial number should be counted as valid or else he would move the court.

“There are more than 2,500 votes with my serial number written against my name while giving first preference to me. This was one of the reasons for my defeat,” said More.

Experts have demanded for electoral reforms in legislative council polls.

“Though most voters in graduate constituencies were affiliated to their respective parties, there was lack of awareness about the process,” said Deepak Pawar, one of the independent candidates in Mumbai graduates constituency.