Cong asks EC to weed out 50 L 'duplicate' voters from rolls

Ahead of Lok Sabha elections, Congress has alleged that there are over 50 lakh duplicate voters on electoral rolls in Delhi, Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka and asked the Election Commission to weed them out.
In a letter to Chief Election Commissioner V S Sampath, Congress Secretary and incharge of legal and human rights department K C Mittal has alleged that while there are 31 lakh duplicate voters in electoral rolls of Andhra Pradesh, as many as 11 lakh such voters in Karnataka and another 10 lakh in Delhi.
Mittal has requested the EC to set up special cells to correct the electoral rolls before the next general elections by weeding out duplicate voters.

Congress has raised the issue of duplicate voters in electoral rolls of the three states after the party's virtual rout in the Delhi assembly poll and with an eye on forthcoming assembly polls in Andhra Pradesh due before June this year.
While Andhra Pradesh has 294 assembly constituencies, the three states account for 77 Lok Sabha seats.
"From a cursory analysis of electoral rolls from New Delhi, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh, it indicates several anomalies to be brought to your kind notice. There appear to be a significant number of duplicate voters. We have also observed a large number of deletions when two electoral rolls back-to-back were compared.

"Irregularities substantiated affect the conduct of fair and proper elections. In these circumstances, it is necessary that the EC conducts an extensive verification of electoral rolls all over the country to delete such names which appear in more than one constituency," Mittal told the CEC.