- 61-year-old Mangaluru man wrongly listed as dead.
- Voter questioned over nine-month age gap with twin.
- 52,000 voters unmapped in Karnataka coastal districts.
The Karnataka Special Intensive Revision (SIR) has been facing increased scrutiny over allegations of flawed notices by electors. Marred by controversy, the exercise faced fresh questions after Donald Joseph Rego, a 61-year-old man from Mangaluru South constituency's Bejai, was listed under the 'dead' category in the Absent, Shifted, Duplicate, Dead and Others (ASDDO) list.
Rego said that the discovery led to his useless visits to the electoral offices only to prove himself alive. He said, "I kept going from one office to another, and instead of taking responsibility, the officials kept directing me to someone else."
Rego kept running from pillar to post as officials kept blaming one another for the flaw. Rego said that the assistant electoral officer (AERO) blamed the booth-level officer (BLO), who in turn told him to speak to the data entry operator.
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After the phase of official buck-passing ended, he eventually got the record corrected. On Monday, he received a revised document and was waiting for his physical voter ID.
Why twin was born in less than nine months
Another bizarre case came to light from Jayanagar, where a voter was issued a notice because of a recorded age gap of nine months between him and his sibling.
The man was, reportedly, asked to appear on September 8 to clarify two things: lack of age gap with his twin and the mismatch in his father's name in the current SIR and the 2002 electoral roll.
Their mother said that her husband's older documents carry a different version of his name. In older documents, the initials of the names were mentioned, which he expanded in later documents.
"My son and daughter are twins, but there are no documents that say so. I have birth certificates, but even those do not state that they are twins," she explained.
In the state's coastal districts, about 52,000 voters reportedly remain unmapped, highlighting the problems in the poll roll revision. The hearings of claims and objections began across the state on September 5 and will continue until September 23.