4 lakh bogus voters in Nagaland, claims anti-corruption group

By Agencies On Sep 19, 2016

Kohima: The Against Corruption and Unabated Taxation (ACAUT) has expressed serious concern over what it claimed that “Nagaland still has approximately 4,00,000 bogus and multiple names to be deleted from the electoral roll.”
In a statement released on Sunday here, ACAUT stated that unless the electoral roll is cleaned up or deletion exercise is taken up on voluntary basis by all the 2500 odd villages, both the clean electoral campaign of the State Election Commission and the clean election movement started by the NBCC would be a futile exercise.
The ACAUT has lauded the extraordinary initiative taken up by the Langpangkong range, Mokokchung district and Diezephe village, under Dimapur district to clean up the electoral roll under their respective jurisdiction.
According to ACAUT, Diezephe village has claimed to have “cleaned up its electorate by deleting all the bogus and proxy names in the village e-roll”.
The village council deleted 274 bogus entries out of the total 672 names in the e-roll leaving behind only 398 names of genuine voters, ACAUT said.
The village chairman Vesato Chuzho, while interacting with ACAUT members, said the village council decided to take this momentous step as per the clean electoral campaign of the State Election Commission and the clean election movement started by the NBCC.
On the other hand, according to ACAUT the village council was now apprehensive that if all the 398 genuine voters end up casting their votes resulting in 100 per cent polling, the ECI would consider such as null and void.
ACAUT, however, lauded the bold move, saying such action was the first in Nagaland that a village council voluntarily decided to clean up its own e-roll. Despite the very fact that every single village in Nagaland was competing against their immediate neighbouring village by illegally enhancing their respective e-roll population, ACAUT said what Diezephe village had done was transformational and counter to the prevalent culture of the day.
In this regard, ACAUT has appealed in a satement on Sunday to all the village councils in Nagaland to follow the example of Diezephe village and Langpangkong range, which it said was the only way the people can fight wide spread corruption at the grass root level. (UNI)