The EC has adopted a search utility programme to weed out multiple entries of the same person’s name in the electoral lists.The new programme, located in the election roll management database software as directed by the Central Election Commission, can identify duplicate or multiple presence of a name in the state electoral rolls. This is the first time that the State Election Commission is using the search utility provided by the software developer, Webel Technologies Ltd (WTL), to weed out duplicate voters.‘‘After the 2004 elections, the Central Election Commission directed us to develop the search utility engine to be run on the voters’ database list. The objective was to locate the voters who have multiple presence,’’ said a senior WTL official.‘‘Already, we have deleted 1,997 persons in Kolkata district. The Election Commission’s directive is helping us to make a clean voters’ list, and we may find more once we are at the advanced stage of the revision process,’’ said Deb Kumar Chakraborty, the district electoral officer.The homegrown software, developed by the government-owned Webel Technologies, has a search engine that can detect if the same person exists on the voters’ list even in a part of each Assembly segment.Even though the voters’ list is fully computerised, it was not possible earlier for anybody to establish if a voter was casting his vote in booths other than the one in which he was registered. Major political parties have favoured this malpractice, ensuring that lists are packed with such ‘‘duplicate’’ voters.The search engine can match a person’s profile in terms of voter’s name, relations’ names, EPIC number — and even phonetic similarities in the name.In the next step, if the Central Election Commission wants, the search engine would be able to scan lists across the 294 Assembly segments in the State to throw up any names that occur in multiple locations.And in the final step, the search engine would also match the photos that appear on the EPICs.
