Youngsters over the age of 17 can now applyin advance to enroll as voters and need not wait to fulfill the pre-requisitecriterion of attaining the age of 18 years on January 1 of a year, the ElectionCommission of India (ECI) announced Thursday.
¡°17+ year old youngsters can now apply inadvance for having their names enrolled in voter¡¯s list and not necessarilyhave to await the pre-requisite criterion of attaining age of 18 years on 1stJanuary of a year,¡± the commission said in a statement.
The electoral roll will be updated everyquarter, and eligible youngsters can be registered in the next quarter of theyear in which they have attained the qualifying age of 18 years, according tothe ECI.
Once the new voters are registered, they will be issued Electoral Photo Identity Cards (EPIC).
¡°For the current round of annual revisionof electoral roll, 2023, any citizen attaining the age of 18 years by April 1,July 1 and October 1 of 2023 can also submit an advance application forregistration as a voter from the date of draft publication of electoral roll,¡±the statement said.
The statement said the commission led bychief election commissioner (CEC) Rajiv Kumar and election commissioner AnupChandra Pandey had directed the chief electoral officers and electoralregistration officers of all states to work out tech-enabled solutions toenable the youth to file their advance applications concerning threesubsequent qualifying dates, which are April 1, July 1 and October 1, and notjust January 1.?
Since the electoral roll was only updatedon January 1 earlier, it meant that many young persons who completed 18 years had to wait for the special summary revision of the next year for enrollment and were unable to participate in elections held in theintervening period.
This provision will boost EC¡¯s efforts to enrol new young voters who turn 18 in a year, for which an amendment was recently made to allow quarterly registration of voters.
EC has already managed to induct 1,736,181(1.7 million) new voters between the ages of 18-19, people familiar with thematter said. Last year, 14,526,678 (14.5 million) new voters were added to thelist.
The commission has identified targetedareas where the number of voters was less than its estimates and directedbooth-level workers to undertake extensive awareness programmes to bring in newvoters.
The commission has also begun the process of linking Aadhaar numbers with electoral roll data.
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