BENGALURU: The Election Commission of India will hold special camps for enrollment of voters on February 23-24 and March 2-3 at all the polling booth across India ahead of the upcoming Lok Sabha polls Karnataka, which has about 58,000 polling booths, will see booth level officers (BLO) present in the booths to receive applications for enrollment. Copies of the latest electoral roll will be made available at the booths so that voters can check their names and apply for changes if needed.Sanjiv Kumar, chief electoral officer, said the main focus of the ongoing enrollment drive is on the first time voters and people with disabilities (PWD).“Every citizen, who has crossed 18 years as on January 1, 2019 is eligible for registering his or her name in the electoral roll. We call upon people to make use of the special camps,” said Kumar. Karnataka has 5,03,07,182 voters: 2,48,46488 male, 2,48,46,488 female and 4,718 other voters.A rather disappointing factor is that there are only 7.5 lakh new voters from the age group of 18 to 19 years, which the CEO said was very low.To encourage enrollment of young voters, the election commission would continue to hold special enrolment programmes in colleges, he said. About one lakh applications have been collected from colleges so far.The heartening factor, however, is the steady improvement in gender ratio. The ratio which was 972 in 2018 has increased to 976. It was 969 in 2017. It is seen as a good stride since the gender ratio was just 958 in 2013.In all, 7.47 lakh names have been deleted from the voters’ list.People can register their names and verify their registration online by visiting the EC portal (www.ceokarnataka,kar.nic.in) or nvsp.in.The ECI has set up a helpline, which can be reached by dialing STD code of the district, followed by 1950 for any queries on electoral rolls.It has called upon political parties to play an active role in enrolling voters. The parties are required to appoint an agent for each of 58,000 polling booths. The political parties, put together, have appointed only 26, 432 agents so far.After the publication of the draft electoral rolls on October 11, 2018, as many as 9,31,484 new electoral photo identity cards (EPIC) have been generated for issue till February 20, 2019. About 7 lakh (697184) EPIC cards were distributed on the occasion of National Voters Day on January 25, 2019. The remaining cards would be distributed on February 23-24 during the special camp.

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