New Delhi: To deal with 33 lakh SIR notices, the office of Chief Electoral Officer (CEO), Delhi, is going to nearly triple its supervisory workforce of assistant electoral registration officers (AEROs). Around 600 principals, tehsildars and officials from Delhi govt departments will be given additional responsibility to resolve the matter, taking the total number of AEROs to 900AEROs play a crucial role in processing and verifying cases related to Special Intensive Revision of the electoral roll, while booth-level officers (BLOs) undertake field verification. AEROs scrutinise claims and objections, check information and supporting documents, and can conduct or order further verification. They also issue and handle notices, hear cases and process decisions.While electoral registration officers (EROs) are usually subdivisional magistrate (SDM)-level officers heading electoral-roll operations in an assembly constituency, AEROs are administrative officials from the district administration and section, assistant section and other officers from different departments.“Due to the work related to claims and objections received from deleted voters and others as well as due to the SIR notices issued to the voters featuring on the draft electoral roll, there is a sudden load on election officials at the assembly constituency level, especially in those having a large number of voters,” said an official.A notification on the addition of AEROs is expected to be issued soon by the office of CEO. They will work from their respective offices, the details of which will be mentioned in the notices sent to voters, said the official.The CEO’s website includes around 33 lakh voters as receiving SIR notices. “The notices are being physically delivered by BLOs concerned. AEROs are issuing the notices and everybody will get them soon,” said the official.According to a SIR bulletin issued Wednesday, 1,06,937 Form-6 applications seeking inclusion in the electoral roll were submitted between Aug 31 and Sept 22, most of which came from people not included on the draft electoral roll. West district recorded the highest number of fresh Form-6 applications at 13,364, followed by North West (11,130), East (10,724) and South East (10,355). New Delhi district received the lowest number of applications at 1,995.
