510 'Portuguese citizens' names removed from electoral rolls

The Election Commission of India (ECI) has deleted names of 510 voters from Goa after they got Portuguese citizenship, which was reported during the recently held electoral roll review.
"The special revision of the electoral roll was held from September 15 to October 14 this year and the names of 510 voters holding Portuguese nationality were deleted," Chief Electoral Officer Kunal told PTI today.
"We realised that in Goa, lots of people opt for Portuguese passport and nationality. Of the total 510, 189 were from North and 321 from South Goa. The state is an erstwhile Portuguese colony, which was linked to the Indian mainstream in the year 1961," he said.

Names of as many as 47,177 new voters have been added in the list, while 25,017 names have been removed owing to their death or absence, he said.
"Total 19,000 first-time voters in the age group of 18-19 years have registered themselves, with the final date of roll publication beingJanuary 5, 2017," Kunal added.
The coastal state will go to polls early next year.

Kunal said as per the draft electoral roll, total number of voters in the state stands at 10,85,271, including 5,19,907 female voters.
Names of 9,790 voters were deleted as they were dead. Majority of names came from South Goa 5,236, while North consisted of 4,554 voters.

There are around 867 absentee voters identified by CEO. "During the summary revision, our focus was basically on enrolment of new voters and cleaning up the electoral roll by deleting the names of dead people and identifying those shifted voters," he said.