Poll body’s drive for good turnout

RESIDENT BODIES SAID THEY ARE HOLDING MEETING WITH CANDIDATES AND ARRANGING TRANSPORT TO THE BOOTHS

NEW DELHI: As the voting turnouts in the municipal elections has been traditionally lower than the assembly and parliamentary polls, the state election commission, Residents Welfare Associations (RWAs) and the city administration are undertaking several initiatives to motivate voters to exercise their franchise in the December 4 civic elections.

In the last three MCD polls, Delhi registered voter turnouts of 53.55%, 53.39% and 43.24% respectively,

RWAs are arranging personal interactions with the candidates, arranging vehicles to help facilitate transport and the state election commission is expanding the ambit of ballot paper based voting to polling staff, elderly and differently abled voters.

Sanjay Rana, the general secretary of Greater Kailash-2 Welfare Association said that the association arranged the interactions of residents with the candidates from AAP, Congress and BJP to understand their perspective on issues faced by the area. “More than 200 people gathered to listen to the candidates in this townhall. When the voters know the candidates personally, they are more likely to vote. We are issuing regular appeals to vote through our social media platforms,” he stated.

Pankaj Aggarwal from Safdarjung Encalve RWA and general secretary of Delhi RWA joint front said that several rounds of meetings have been held in the last week to encourage voters to turnout in good numbers to vote. “the interest of voters also depends on the quality of candidates. We will be arranging car pooling to help transportation services for elderly and people who need help to reach the polling stations,” he added.

Ballot voting begins

With one day to for the MCD elections on Sunday, those voters who have been given the option to cast their vote through ballot paper, have begun casting their votes. These voters include more than 100,00 civic officials and 40,000 police officers on election duty, over 204,301 voters aged above 80 years and differentlyabled people, officials from the state election commission (SEC) said on Friday.

This process will continue till Tuesday, December 6, and the votes will be counted on Wednesday, officials added.

An SEC official involved in the process said the administration is ensuring that voting is carried out from home for these categories of voters and their ballot papers were distributed during their training for polling duty. There are 16,000 polling parties and 950 counting parties who have undergone three rounds of training between November 24 and December 2. “The last round of the training was undertaken at the level of returning police officers in December where master trainers and staff undertaking election duty cast their votes,” the official added.