Pune: The state election department has received over 12 lakh applications, including those for new voters as well as for deletion of names and change of address, ahead of December 9, the last date for submission of applications to register as voters for the upcoming Lok Sabha elections.The election officials have told voters to check their names on the electoral list and apply for corrections, if any, so that the correct names can reflect in the final voter list to be published on January 5.Of the 12.66 lakh applications, the maximum applications of 1 lakh each have been received from Pune and Nagpur districts, data from theelection office showed.Election officials said that of these forms, around 5.12 lakh have been accepted while 23,030 rejected as they have been found to be incomplete.The total forms pending for clearance are 7.31 lakh, officials added. The election department expects more applications in the last four days. State CEO Shrikant Deshpande said that one can file applications both offline as well as online. He said that he has told the collectors to ensure that all the applications are cleared by the electoral registration officers (EROs) by December 26. All the 288 EROs will have to assign one lakh booth level officers (BLOs) for field verification, he told TOI. The Election Commission of India in a recent meeting directed the state officials to ensure that all the applications received are cleared by the BLOs ahead of the January 5 publication of electoral roll.The state has 9.02 crore voters as per the draft electoral roll published in October. Altogether 5.6 lakh voters were added in the draft electoral roll over the last 10 months after officials carried out an exercise for addition and deletion of voters names via door-to-door surveys and other means. We also published the following articles recentlyVoters participate in electoral festival with much enthusiasm in Telangana electionsTelangana assembly polls started across 35,655 booths in the state at 7 am on November 30. The overall turnout gradually picked up, with districts performing better than Hyderabad and its surroundings. Some polling stations faced issues with the EVM and voters faced problems finding their names on the rolls. Split votes in the citys IT corridor led to families returning without voting. Despite a few incidents of violence, the voting remained peaceful.26% of 25.5 lakh applicants for minority scholarship bogusA scrutiny of the 25.5 lakh applicants verified by states for the minority scholarship scheme of the ministry of minority affairs for 2022-23 revealed that over 6.7 lakh applicants were found to be nonexistent during Aadhaar-based biometric authentication. Additionally, the scrutiny showed that out of the INOs and HoIs responsible for verification, 5,422 INOs and 4,834 HoIs were missing during the authentication exercise. The ministry-led drive verified a total of 18.8 lakh applicants, including 6.2 lakh renewal applicants. The scrutiny also revealed that 30% of renewal applicants in 2022-23 were found to be bogus.Only 5.6 lakh specially abled voters registered across stateLack of data on differently-abled voters in Pune poses a problem for election officials. The total count of disabled voters is still unknown. The electoral roll voluntary marks voters as disabled. The state has 5.56 lakh disabled voters, slightly higher than last year. The government needs to conduct a survey to ensure accurate numbers of disabled voters. The Election Commission has directed the state to focus on disabled voter coverage.

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