Staff Reporter
Guwahati: The Election Commission of India (ECI) has decided to carry out a special summary revision of the photo electoral rolls for the state of Assam with January 1, 2025 as the qualifying date. In this regard, the ECI has written to the chief electoral officer, Assam, to conduct special summary revision (SSR) 2025 in two phases.
This will be the second such SSR after the recent delimitation of constituencies by ECI in Assam. The delimitation exercise was completed in August 2023.
In a letter from the ECI, it was stated, “Now, the Commission has decided to carry out Annual Summary Revision with reference to January 1, 2025 as the qualifying date in such a manner that the electoral rolls are finally published much before National Voters’ Day (January 25 of every year), so that Electors’ Photo Identity Cards (EPICs) generated for new electors, especially young voters (18–19 years), can be distributed to them in a ceremonial manner on the day of NVD.”
“There are two stages to conducting the revision exercise of the electoral roll, namely, pre-revision activities and revision activities. For the purpose of achieving good-quality electoral rolls, pre-revision activities are given equal weight as revision activities,” the letter added.
The pre-revision activity will start on August 20 and continue until October 28, 2024.
The pre-revision activity will include the following steps:
House-to-house verification through booth-level officers (BLOs); rationalization and re-arrangement of Polling Stations; removal of discrepancies in the electoral roll/EPIC; improvement of image quality, ensuring good-quality photographs by replacing blurred, poor-quality, and not to specification and non-human images in the roll, wherever necessary; preparation of an integrated draft roll with reference to January 1, 2025 as the qualifying date.
The main revision activity will start on October 29, 2024, and be completed on January 6, 2025. The election department will publish the draft photo electoral roll for Assam on October 29. The period for filing claims and objections will begin on October 29 and end on November 28, 2024. All claims and objections will be disposed of by December 24, 2024, and the final photo electoral rolls will be published on January 6, 2025.
House-to-house field verification: For field verification, the BLOs will be given a pre-filled BLO register containing the details of existing electors in their respective parts for a house-to-house field visit and to get the said details verified from the head of the family. In addition to that, BLOs will collect information on: (a) unenrolled eligible citizens (eligible on October 1, 2024); (b) prospective electors (eligible on January 1, 2025); (c) prospective electors (eligible on three subsequent qualifying dates); (d) multiple entries, dead electors, and permanently shifted electors; and (e) corrections in the ER entries.
On completion of field verification, each BLO and each Electoral Registration Officer shall furnish the certificate to the Chief Electoral Officer through the District Electoral Officer concerned, to the effect that details in respect of all the above items have been collected 100% without anything left over.
SSR 2025 will also be conducted in other states, following the direction of ECI, except in the poll-bound states of Haryana, Jharkhand, Maharashtra, and the UT of Jammu & Kashmir.
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