A stay order issued by the Supreme Court on Friday in favour of the State Election Commission’s (SEC) plea for using the electoral rolls prepared in 2015 is expected to clear the roadblocks for conducting the local body elections in time.
Local Self-Government Department sources told The Hindu that the State Delimitation Commission would meet on March 11 and set the ball rolling without any hitch. In the wake of the apex court order, the SEC may have to grant at least one more week for enrolment and complete the hearing of those who had placed applications for having their names in the electoral roll.
Complaints of the SEC denying opportunity for more voters to enrol their names may not hold water since the facility for enrolment would be provided twice, after completing the delimitation of wards and then before going to the polls. That means, all those who are eligible to be enrolled would have their names in the voters’ list, sources said.
Since the rolls prepared by the SEC in 2015 with the consent of the Central Election Commission have ward specific details, using it would expedite the process and clear the hurdles, if any, in holding the elections in time.
The SEC’s proposal to conduct the elections on a modest budget was widely appreciated. Since the State was facing a serious resource crunch, the government had decided to limit the expenses to the bare minimum and scale down the delimitation process. The SEC proposal to avert an additional expenditure of ₹10 crore by using the 2015 poll rolls is seen as a sagacious move to save expenditure and time.
While the State government had reiterated that it was amenable to any decision of the SEC, the United Democratic Front’s (UDF) bid to draw the election process into a litigation had come in for criticism. This was construed as an attempt to delay the polls.
But the latest decision would expedite the preparation of poll rolls and the delimitation of wards, so that the elections could be conducted as scheduled, sources said.
