Tuesday, March 24, 2009

Getting onto the electoral rolls

I checked from election commission's website that Koramangala falls under 172-BTM Layout. Relevant documents:
Electoral Registration Officers in Bangalore and
Electoral Registration Officer’s (EROs) of 21 New (Delimited) Legislative Assembly Constituencies of BBMP.
Folks from office also verified that my house falls under BTM constituency.

Next, filled out form 6, attached photocopy of passport and ration card and submitted at the ERO office at the BBMP office in Madiwala, next to ayyappa temple (wikimapia link) . The office timing was from 8:00 AM to 12:00 PM and 4:00 to 8:00 PM; I was there at about 9:30 and it took around half-hour to submit the form. They gave me an acknowledgement and said that the name should show up in about one week. The BBMP office in Madiwala is not indicated as an ERO office on the pdf files. You can call the ERO office before you go and verify if there is another center closer to you.

Many are checking out jaago re to get their names onto the voters list. Jaago rey lets you fill out the information on form 6 directly as pdf. You have to hand over the form yourself. I did not use jaao rey, preferred to download the form from Govt site.

The Govt. websites themselves are not too bad. Karnataka has a website that shows wether your name is on the voters list or not.

Once your name gets onto the electoral rolls, you should be able to go to the local ERO office and get your voters ID card. Today, there was a huge crowd outside the BBMP office for getting the ID card; hopefully it would not be necessary to go to the BBMP office to get ID card. During election time, like right now, one can also get a voters ID card at local offices like at the Chinmaya school in Koramangala. The latter serves local communities and would be less crowded.

PS: This is the first time I am in India during General Elections as an adult, and I +vely want to be on the voters list.

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