Voters queue up for photo identity card

By Our Staff Reporter

CHENNAI, AUG. 26. Chandraiah Chetty paused in front of the West Class room, Dr. Ambedkar Law College, checked something in a small slip of paper he was carrying, and made sure that he had come to the right place.

Then he joined the queue of voters in the Harbour Assembly constituency seeking a photo-identity card. Besides him, 120 people from some eight streets turned up at the College on the last day, Saturday, to get themselves photographed for issue of voter photo-id cards.

``Yesterday there was a reasonably good turnout,'' says an official manning the booth. ``Today it is slightly lower,'' he adds.

On Friday, some 4000 voters had turned up at the 25 booths marked for the purpose. ``In this Assembly constituency, we are doing the work in two phases. In the first one, we selected 25 booths from one part and completed the work there. This is the second phase,'' an election official says.

Compared to the size of the electorate, the turn out has been poor in most Assembly segments covered earlier in the new computerised photo-id campaign too - in Royapuram, Egmore, Triplicane and Park Town.

The campaign is yet to move to one of the most preferred of city constituencies, Thousand Lights. The photo-id card schedule moves to Chepauk from Harbour.

While some residents in Harbour charged that there was no notice before the campaign got underway, a couple of others asked how many times they would have to trek to the booth for a photo id card. ``I had gone to the booth in 1996 when the scheme was launched,'' said a resident of Binny Road. ``When I received my card, I found that my age was changed, my address was also different. Also, none of my family members who came received the card,'' he added.

The voter brought the discrepancy to the notice of the authorities, who took the card from him and gave him an acknowledgement slip. Four years after he was photographed and three years after the card was taken away from him, there was no news as yet from the election department.

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Section  : Southern States
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