100K volunteers, 70 war rooms: AAP ready for big day

NEWDELHI: The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) has readied an army of nearly 100,000 volunteers to ensure a high voter turnout and keep an eye on any possible malpractice in electronic voting machines that will be used when Delhi goes to polls on Saturday.

The party, with the help of I-PAC, a firm that helps political parties with poll strategies, has set up 70 war rooms in every assembly constituency and one central war room at Firoz Shah Road.

The party in a statement said it would deploy 67,815 “booth-level mobilisers” across the Capital on Saturday to convince people to come out and vote.apart from this, 27,126 ‘booth-level agents’ will be present across the total 13,563 booths in Delhi.

Each booth will have at least two agents from AAP to keep a tab on the voter turnout in every area.

“Delhi votes from 8am to 6pm. The task of the polling agents will be to check voter turnout from time to time and relay it to the war room. Whenever the turnout is found to be unfavourable compared to AAP’S support base in the area, the respective candidates and the constituency mobilisers will be alerted. At least five mobilisers will be present at every booth, who will then have to bring voters out to the polling booths,” a senior party leader said. The booth level agents have been trained to keep a tab on EVM operations and malpractices, if any, the leader said.

For its war rooms, the party has gathered an additional 1,400 volunteers who will be handling data collection and analysis.

Each of the 70 war rooms will have 20 members per assembly constituency, which will be led by a ‘war room specialist’.

These teams will be responsible for real-time assessment of voting trends and raising interventions to the election commission.