As Bihar prepares for the assembly elections later this year, the Election Commission of India (ECI) is taking several initiatives which will start in the state.
ECI Assistant Director Apoorva Kumar Singh said, “The ECI is focusing on making voting easy, fast and fair and election process more inclusive.” “We are starting the changes based on the previous feedback, making many debuts with Bihar elections.”
For the first time, polling booths will include mobile deposit facilities – a response to complaints from voters struggling to manage their phone. Singh said, “This will reduce his burden, especially for those who vote alone.”
The ECI will make the number of voters of the polling station below 1,200 below 1,200 below 1,500, “to cut the crowd, reduce waiting time and speed up voting”.
Additional booths will be installed in high -growing buildings and residential colonies that target urban pockets with densely populated, a strategy borrowed from recent Lok Sabha successes in many cities.
Voter information slip is also getting a makeover. ECI hopes that each voter’s processing is expected to trim 20–30 seconds from time to time, which is leading to less queues and smooth voting, increasing serial and part numbers for easy readability.
Updating the electoral rolls is on the ECI priority list, with the first plans for the election, which is first planned in about two decades. To address the old entries, ECI will use India’s Registrar General (RGI) Death Registration Database.
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Singh said, “After using the death registration data from RGI, after the door-to-door check, we will keep updating the electoral rolls. The deletion is a sensitive issue. We will not remove the names without ground verification.”
For the first time, booth-tier agents, including 11 Bihar-based parties, have been trained at the India International Institute of Democracy and Election Management (IIIDEM) in Delhi, where all election-related officers have been trained.
Singh said, “Political parties are our biggest stakeholders, as well as with voters.” The canvasing distance criteria, 100 meters from the polling station entrances, has been reduced to the canvaging distance criteria to balance the visibility and order.
More than 40 existing platforms will also be launched during a single-app solution, Ekinet dashboard, Bihar elections. The ECI official said that the issues of duplicate epic number have also been resolved, ensuring that each voter gets a unique identity.
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Election workers are not being left behind. Booth-level officer (BLOS) will now take standard photo ID cards-one and first-trust to promote and reduce public interactions. Singh said, “Not having proper ID was a hindrance.”
In addition, more than 3,000 booth-level supervisors, including people of Bihar, have been trained in IIIDEM, which plans to train one lakh more nationwide. Similarly, training for a batch of police officers has been conducted at the institute.
The Assistant Director of the ECI said that the pole body, IIEDEM is considering orientation for media personnel across the country, in batches, Bihar-based journalists have been started to intensify election reporting and voter education efforts.
The electoral body aims to increase the voter up to a national average of 66.10% of Bihar in the last Lok Sabha elections.
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