The National Identity Registration Division of the Election Commission (EC) says it spotted ‘discrepancies’ in 44 Upazilas during updating of voters list.
New voters are registered, those deceased are excluded and wrong information is corrected in the revised list.
The NID registration wing has sought explanations from the Upazila election officials about the ‘errors’.
Letters sent to them say the number of forms filled-up and data entered was “incomplete and incoherent” and requested them to fix the list on an emergency basis.
Voter list in some of these 44 Upazilas do not have anything on those on the rolls who are dead.
Others contain confusing information on the number of voters.
The number of forms submitted for registration and the number of voters registered differed in some Upazilas.
So far, the list has been updated in nearly 400 Upazilas, EC officials say.
Several Upazila election officials have explained the ‘confusion of numbers’ in the voter list.
While updating the list, information on eligible voters are collected in designated format. They are then photographed and registered as voters.
In some areas, many people did not show up for being photographed and this led to anomalies in numbers, the election officials claimed.
EC officials say a draft voter list will be published in early 2015 and hope to fix the errors before that.
Bangladesh has over 91.9 million voters. The EC believes another 4.6 million new voters will be added to the list after the update.
