Around 70 lakh newly enlisted voters in the latest voters’ roll update will not get their national identification cards before the next parliamentary elections to be held on January 24, 2014 at the latest.
The Election Commission began the update on March 10 across the country and wrapped up the task on December 15 last.
According to the EC statistics, 69,30,303 new voters were registered during the update, posting an increase in the number of enlisted voters by about 1.1 crore from that on the list under which the 2008 general elections were held.
The updated electoral roll is now on display in district and upazila election offices, union parishads, wards of city corporations and municipalities, and cantonment boards for people to check if they were left out or if there were any flaws in it.
People may raise objections about the draft voters’ list till January 17.
The commission expects that several thousand new voters who might have been left out in the last update may have to be enlisted by January 17.
EC officials, however, said they would not be able to start preparing NID cards for the new voters as the commission would remain otherwise preoccupied.
‘The commission will now need to get the electoral roll ready, including its printing, for the next polls,’ election commissioner
Shah Nawaz told New Age.
‘We will embark on preparing the NID cards only after making the list ready for the polls which will take about six months,’ he added.
When contacted, the director general of NID and voters’ list preparation wing of the EC, brigadier general Akhtaruzzaman Siddique, said the commission would require about one and a half years to provide the new voters with their NID cards.
‘We will have to prepare the voters’ list which include printing and preparing CD version of it before the next polls,’ said Akhtaruzzaman.
He said after completing these tasks, the commission would start preparing NID cards for the new voters.
The EC at a meeting on December 9 decided to make the voters’ roll ready by May 2013 for the next parliamentary elections.
The EC plans to resolve by January 22 the objections received till January 17 and revise the electoral roll by January 26. The final electoral roll will be published on January 31 under the Voters’ List Rule 2012.
EC officials said the commission would need time until it March 10 to weed out any double entries by matching the updated electoral rolls received from upazilas with the records at its central database.
The EC said it would prepare area-wise voters’ lists in Portable Document Format, better known as PDF, written on compact discs for sending them to upazila election offices by March 30 for final scrutiny.
Following the scrutiny, upazila election offices are scheduled to return the lists to the EC by April 10 for printing, said officials.