Voting Experience

Recently we had GHMC (Greater Hyderabad Municipal Commission) elections. Since our return to India 10 years back, I have been the conscientious citizen of India not missing a single voting opportunity. I may be politically dumb but that doesn't deter me from being the supporter of the underdog and vote for Lok Satta. I was eager to exercise my right with NOTA this time.

The best thing I love about voting is going there early morning, be among the first people to vote. So off we went, me and my hubby, at 7:45am to vote. We didn't get the customary voting slips this time. We didn't pay much attention to it, wrote it off as manual glitch, since both of us are working must have missed it. After all we were on the roles for the past couple of elections, so where will we disappear. As expected there were no one at the polling booth, so I was elated. Our company had given us half a day off and I planned on completing few errands and reach workplace post lunch. 

Alas, our name was not to be found in the list. Without that no voting. Hmm, what to do? The polling agents didn't have a clue and to us it seemed like they weren't even checking sincerely, just flipping the pages and declaring not there. Since there was no one to vote, we were allowed to go into the polling booth and check. No luck. Our area has two polling stations, so we checked even there, without any luck. We were back home by 8am, sans voting.

My husband was non challant and started getting ready to go to work. I was determine to cast my vote, so spent the next half hour trying all known websites to locate our names. I discovered that not only ours but majority of our apartment residents' names were also missing. With nothing else to do and not expecting much to happen, I randomly called the Election Commission's office.

Surprise, surprise. Someone from a Govt. office, answered the landline before 9am. And to top things, she was very courteous, polite and helpful. I was so impressed with her that I decided to dedicate this blog to her. Alas, I forgot to ask her name. 

This is the gist of what she said and I guess it works the same for all states in India. The CEO of every state maintains the voter database, which is used for national, state and municipal elections. They keep updating the database every year. For some reason, our names got deleted from that list. So from our end, as citizens, we can check the state CEO website for our names once a year in January. If our name is missing we can apply online and it will be processed. If we do this exercise we will not be missing our voting chance. Agreed there are loopholes in the system, but we can do our bit to fill the gaps and be part of India Shining.

As for me, I decided to go back to work and get things done, instead of trying to do personal work in office time.