Kerala State Election Commissioner V Bhaskaran on Wednesday released the voters list consisting of 2,62,24,501 people who are eligible to cast their votes in the local body polls to be held in October this year.
Elections will be held to elect new representatives to 941 village councils, 152 blocks, 14 district panchayats, 86 municipalities and 6 municipal corporations.
“The draft list had 2,51,58,230 people. The new voters added to this list is 14,79,541. From this we had to remove the people who passed away or moved out of town. That number was 4,13,270. That’s how we got the total,” Bhaskaran told TNM.
People who are not yet registered will get two more chances to do so and the list will further be updated, he said.
"It has also been decided to extend the poll timing as and when held by an hour. It will now be scheduled from 7 am to 6 pm. For this, suitable amendments will now be made to the Panchayati Raj Act," Bhaskaran earlier told the media.
Earlier the Kerala Election Commission approached the Supreme Court against the decision of the Kerala High Court division bench to conduct the election on the basis of the 2019 voters list used for the Lok Sabha Polls. The SC had stayed the HC verdict and allowed the Election Commission to proceed with the revision of the 2015 list of voters used for the local body elections.
“The difficulty in taking the 2019 Lok Sabha list is, we’d need to make it ward wise and then block wise. For this about 25,000 people will have to be sent to homes, to verify the names in each household. All this would require an expenditure of about Rs 10 crore, which was way too much to spend now. But instead of that we already have a ward wise list prepared for local body polls in 2015. We just had to update it with the list of new voters and remove the names of those who have died or gone away,” Bhaskaran said.
The voters list now consists of 1,25,40,302 men, 1,36,84,019 women and 180 transgender people. A total of 6,78,147 men, 8,01,328 women and 66 transgender people are new voters.