New Delhi: The office of the chief electoral officer (CEO) of Delhi is sensitising the city’s nearly 15,000 BLOs to encourage eligible voters whose names are missing from the draft SIR rolls to fill in Form 6, stating that they could do so without fear of prosecution.Till Nov 3, only around 2.9 lakh voters (including many first-time voters) out of 47.6 lakh who had been dropped from the initial list, out of Delhi’s over 1.4 crore voters, submitted applications for inclusion in the rolls.The clarification came Wednesday amid concerns among many voters that submitting Form 6 will amount to making a false declaration, as it requires applicants to state that their names are being included in the electoral rolls for the first time. They fear this could expose them to prosecution under Section 31 of Representation of the People Act, 1950, since they were enrolled earlier.According to a bulletin issued by the city’s poll panel, Delhi voters have submitted 4.9 lakh forms during SIR’s ongoing claims and objections period between Aug 31 and Nov 3, including over 2.9 lakh Form 6 applications, 26,869 Form 7 applications seeking deletion of names, nearly 1.1 lakh Form 8 applications for correction of entries or shifting of residence within a constituency, and 524 Form 6A applications for registration of overseas Indian voters. The claims and objections period will continue till Nov 25.Out of 33.1 lakh electors issued SIR notices for no-mapping and logical discrepancies like spelling mismatch, 32.4 lakh or 97.6% have been verified and parked for inclusion in the final rolls as of Nov 4. They include 13 lakh of the 13.8 lakh no-mapping cases and 19.3 lakh cases flagged for logical discrepancies.
