UP civic polls: Names missing from voters’ list

Lucknow: The second phase of polling in the municipal elections in Uttar Pradesh was blighted by missing names in the voters’ list and problems with EVMs.

Former Union minister Kalraj Misra and  former Lucknow mayor Dauji Gupta were among those who could not cast their votes because their names were missing from the voters’ list.

Both the leaders had cast their votes in the Assembly elections earlier this year. DGP Sulkhan Singh could not cast his vote because the colony in Gomti Nagar Extension where he lives has not been notified to the municipal corporation even though it is nine years old.

Residents of government colonies in Lucknow also said that their names were struck off the voters’ list.

In Varanasi, the name of Veerbhadra Nishad, one of the proposers of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s candidature in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, was missing. The faults in the voters’ list led to unrest at several places and Samajwadi Party president Akhilesh Yadav tweeted “Media reports that a lot of voters names are missing from the voting list of today’s election. This type of digital India cannot take us forward.”

State election commissioner Satish Kumar Agarwal said that some names may have gone missing in the exercise to weed out duplicity and it should ahev been the responsibility of the voters also to check if their names were included.

Earlier in the day, violence was reported from some districts where voters clashed with officials due to faulty EVMs. Polling, however, was not disrupted.