Sources said one of the main objectives of the SIR drive is to identify "many persons" who have, knowingly or unknowingly, managed to retain multiple voter cards of different constituencies.
New Delhi:As election officers conduct intensive house-to-house survey as part of Bihar’s Special Intensive Review (SIR) of the voters list of the state, Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) Mr Gyanesh Kumar on Tuesday said that eligible citizens should register themselves as voters only in constituencies of which they are ordinary residents and not the place where they own a house.
"As per the Representation of the People Act, you are entitled to vote only in the assembly constituency where you are an ordinary resident. For example, if you ordinarily reside in Delhi but own a house in Patna, your vote should be registered in Delhi, not in Patna," the CEC said while addressing a group of booth-level officers who are undertaking training in Delhi.
Sources said one of the main objectives of the SIR drive is to identify "many persons" who have, knowingly or unknowingly, managed to retain multiple voter cards of different constituencies. They added that there are several instances where persons are ordinary residents of one place and have got their voter card from that location while retaining their earlier card from before migration. Sources added that the move is also to weed out illegal foreign migrants.
Bihar is first of the six states that is going through SIR in view of upcoming assembly polls. Assam, Kerala, Puducherry, Tamil Nadu and West Bengal, where elections are scheduled in 2026, too will go through the same exercise.
Meanwhile, ECI sources said that the Commission had received on Monday from a legal counsel of the Congress, seeking an urgent appointment with the Election Commission for Wednesday regarding SIR of Bihar, on behalf of many political parties, by representing himself as a counsel of multi-party delegation. The Commission sought confirmation from these political parties for such a meeting. “However, the Commission has not received any confirmation so far. Hence, the meeting of July 2 (Wednesday) had to be deferred,” sources said.
