Pune: Kondhwa Khurd has voters who are 126 years old. That makes them the oldest humans on the planet and they are in sizeable numbers too, according to the draft electoral roll.A voter from Hadapsar assembly constituency who checked the list on Monday found that his age was registered as 126 years, despite the earlier electoral roll carrying his correct age.“I am the oldest man alive on the planet. It is a record. When I checked the part number, I saw several people from Kondhwa Khurd in the list who were also 126. It is a unique thing. Only, we are nowhere near that age. Now we have to fill up Form 8 for corrections for no fault of ours,” he said.Misspelled names, wrong ages and vague addresses marked the draft electoral roll published on Monday. Voters who found their names in the list were relieved but many said their particulars, correctly recorded before Special Intensive Revision (SIR), now contain glaring errors.“We didn’t make these errors. We submitted forms with the right information,” Kothrud senior citizen Usha said, after finding her address wrongly recorded in the draft roll.In one Kothrud housing society, more than 300 electors found their addresses listed as “Bandal”, although their addresses were correctly recorded in the pre-SIR roll. The locality has no connection with the housing society.“It is disheartening to see our addresses mentioned as a totally unrelated area. When the aim is to have a clean electoral roll, why should there be such confusion?” Usha said.Several voters from certain communities have also complained that their names were spelled incorrectly, despite clearly providing their details during the enumeration exercise. Mini Kartikeyan, one such voter, said she would have to fill Form 8 despite filling up her enumeration form in English in bold letters.Election officials said voters can file Form 8 during the claims-and-objections period to correct particulars in an existing electoral roll. The form covers corrections to name, gender, age/date of birth, relationship details and address, besides shifting of residence and replacement of an EPIC.Activists said such errors could be linked to the large-scale digitisation exercise and data-entry work undertaken within a tight timeframe. They said voters should not have to bear the burden of correcting mistakes that may have occurred during data entry.Rohan Joshi, an active member who helps citizens with the voting process, said that there are several such cases and thousands won’t check the roll, leave alone fill Form 8 to correct them. “This is a problem that will only grow,’’ he said.The errors matter more because the SIR database is also being checked for logical discrepancies. An incorrect age, relationship detail or address could trigger scrutiny when records are compared with family members or older electoral rolls, add activists.The scale of corrections could be substantial. In Odisha, which has already gone through the post-draft stages of SIR, nearly two lakh Form 8 applications were received for corrections to names, addresses, age and other details, besides shifting-related requests. West Bengal has provided a sharper warning. Around 27 lakh names were deleted after the SIR process on grounds of logical discrepancy, and the Supreme Court was recently told that only about seven lakh of those affected had appealed.BOX | What discrepancies are voters finding?Wrong age, date of birth, misspelled namesIncorrect addresses and localities I More than 300 voters in a Kothrud society reportedly found “Bandal” recorded as their addressMisspelled names I These include complaints from members of South Indian communitiesWrong gender detailsErrors in father’s, mother’s or husband’s nameIncorrect relationship detailsFamily-detail mismatches that can trigger logical discrepanciesDuplicate or shifted entriesOther data-entry or digitisation errors in existing electoral particularsSearching for names is difficult on the website because the part numbers have changed. I tried looking up for the part number in the PDF as per my previous voter ID which yielded nothing. One part is close to 25 pages so checking each part in my constituency is a humungous task and also time consumingAshok Tupe I Kharadi residentI looked up the names of four of our family members and my brother’s name is missing. We will now check how to include his name back on the electoral listSakshi Khera I A Kalyaninagar resident
