New DelhiJul 17, 2025 19:17 IST
First published on: Jul 17, 2025 at 18:51 IST
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Days after NDA ally, the Telugu Desam Party (TDP), batted for Aadhaar cards to be made a valid document as proof of date of birth in electoral roll revisions, the M K Stalin-led DMK on Thursday made a similar suggestion to the Election Commission (EC).
The DMK’s suggestion also comes days after the Supreme Court on July 10, while hearing a batch of petitions challenging the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) in poll-bound Bihar, urged the poll body to consider allowing voters to furnish Aadhaar cards, voter IDs and ration cards as valid documents to prove their date and place of birth. The apex court asked the EC to file its counter-affidavit by July 21.
A DMK delegation, headed by party MP N R Elango met Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) Gyanesh Kumar, and election commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi, as a part of the EC’s meetings with national and state parties to take feedback on further strengthening electoral processes.
Terming the meeting with the EC as “fruitful” on social media, Elango said the poll panel assured that it would look into four of the five suggestions that the party had made. On the inclusion of Aadhaar, the MP said that the EC said the matter was sub-judice.
As reported by The Indian Express, the EC on July 5 wrote to Chief Electoral Officers (CEOs) of all states, directing them to begin preparations for a Bihar-like exercise with January 1, 2026, as the qualifying date.
The DMK also urged the EC to implement its May 1 notification, which seeks to allow names of dead voters to be deleted by Electoral Registration Officers (EROs) after getting information and verification from the Registrar of Births and Deaths by the Booth-Level Officer (BLO) instead of waiting for a family member to file Form 7.
Claiming that no steps had been taken to implement this, the DMK in its letter said, “Unless names of deceased voters are deleted, the purification of electoral rolls will never be complete.”
The DMK also called for better coordination between EC-appointed BLOs and Booth-Level Agents (BLAs), who are appointed by political parties.
According to Elango, the DMK was informed that the EC was in the process of translating its handbooks and manuals into Tamil and other official languages.
Claiming that the new process of counting postal votes was “causing confusion”, the Stalin-led party also wanted the EC to revert to the earlier process, in which the penultimate round of counting EVM votes was withheld till postal ballots were accounted for. This process was changed in 2019 and allowed votes from EVMs to be counted irrespective of the status of postal ballot counting.