A three-member team of the Election Commission of India (ECI) on Tuesday visited Jamshedpur to conduct an orientation workshop at XISS auditorium for block level officers on the use of Booth App.
While addressing the block level officials Deputy Election Commissioner Sudeep Jain said that a large share of the credit for successfully conducting elections in India goes to the BLOs.
“You have an important role of making voters aware and ensuring that they cast their votes. There are polling booths in India which have only one voter in the list. This shows the importance of every vote,” said Jain. Chief Electoral Officer, Jharkhand, Vinay Kumar Choubey congratulated the BLOs for adding a large number of women and young voters to the electoral roll. He said that the Booth App will be used in 10 Assembly constituencies spread across nine districts during the elections here. Praising the voters’ awareness jingle released by East Singhbhum district administration, Choubey said that it would be linked to the Systematic Voters’ Education and Electoral Participation (SVEEP) program of the state.
Through the Booth App, voters will be able to get real-time status of their polling booth and time their visit accordingly in order to avoid waiting in queue. The BLOs will also be able to use the App and know the real-time status of voter turnout in a particular polling station. The App was used in pilot projects during the Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra and Haryana elections.
Booth app will be used in 49-Jamshedpur West and 48-Jamshedpur East Assembly Constituencies in this district.
Meanwhile, officials from the Chief Electoral Officer’s office in Ranchi on Tuesday said that the polling process in at least 25 per cent of polling stations in all the districts will be webcasted. Deputy Secretary in CEO’s office, Shabbir Ahmad said that all necessary arrangements are being made for live streaming of voting related activities inside the polling stations. On the polling day, the office of the CEO and dedicated control rooms in all the districts will monitor live webcasting at polling stations.
The control rooms, he added, will have a nodal officer and technical assistant. Timely and quick fixes for any error during live monitoring of webcasting will be ensured by the control rooms. For this, a police officer with a wireless set will also be deployed in the control room.
The flow of live streaming will be tested two days in advance in order to ensure zero lapses in the process on the day of polling. Elections for the 81 assembly constituencies in Jharkhand will begin on November 30 and end on December 20.
The final counting will be done on December 23 and the results will be declared on the same day.
According to figures with the ECI, at least 67 of the 81 constituencies here are Left Wing Extremism affected. Central forces and local police will be deployed in sufficient numbers across all the constituencies to maintain law and order and ensure peaceful polls in Jharkhand ECI has said.
