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Hard to find voting info

Many fail to cast vote

Staff Correspondent
Despite frantic attempts, many voters in the capital could not cast their votes yesterday as they were unable to find their voter numbers at the polling centres.
Some tried for hours to find out their numbers, but they had to return home disappointed. They asked for help from their candidates' polling agents, but the agents too could not come up with a solution since it was almost an impossible task to find out names from a voter list without serial numbers.
It all happened because the electorate in many constituencies were not provided with voter slips by the campaigners. Ahead of the contested elections in the past, candidates used to give the constituents voter slips with voter numbers and the names of the polling centres while conducting door-to-door campaigns.
"I looked for my number for three hours but no one could help," said Abul Hossain while leaving the Shahjadpur Najar Mahmud Alim Madrasa polling centre in Dhaka-17, which has a total of 5,761 voters.
Ramzan Ali faced a similar problem. He too could not vote as he did not know his number. "Despite the shivering cold, I came here around 8:30am, but it's now almost 12 noon and I could not cast my vote."
At this centre, many voters took their national ID cards, mistakenly assuming that the number printed on the card would be the voter number. Finding no way, some talked to the presiding officer who asked them to collect their voters' numbers from the polling agents.
"But the polling agents got frustrated and said it was not possible to find a name from a list of more than 5,500 people," Ramzan added.
Some voters, however, alleged that the activists of the candidates gave wrong voter numbers.
Fulomala Bala was among them. After wandering from one booth to another at Monipur High School, Fulomala along with her daughter finally got the number from the party activists outside. But unfortunately it was a wrong number.
“As I went inside the booth with the num-
ber, the polling officials rejected it. I will go home now as I am fed up," said Fulomala.
New voters too had to go through huge sufferings. Many such voters at Gendaria High School, the polling centre for Dhaka-6 constituency, did not know where their polling centre would be. And they could not find it out because the lists provided by the Election Commission were haphazardly organised.
Rubina, a new voter, left the centre downcast after not being able to cast her vote despite looking for her voter serial number for two hours.
Presiding Officer Anwarul Rashid said, "The only way a voter could find out his or her voter serial number was by going through the lists of names and addresses. Even the addresses were not organised according to the holding numbers, making it impossible for many to find their serial numbers."
The voter ID card proved to be useless as well, since it had no correlation with the voter number.
Party activists of contending candidates voluntarily helped some voters find their serial numbers, but many more went back disappointed as their numbers could not be found.
The lists given out by the EC are not updated with the details of the voters who registered late, party activists said.
"I've volunteered in several other elections before. But never have I seen such a mess on the voters lists," said Musaddi Hossain Khan, an election worker for independent candidate Saidur Rahman Shahid, who contested in Dhaka-6.