Punjab MC election: Jalandhar voters face uphill task in locating their booths, many leave without vote cast

The people who were out on Saturday to cast their votes for the Jalandhar Municipal Corporation elections had to face an uphill task in locating the booths where they were to cast their votes.

The voters said they had been told that since there had been delimitation of wards, their booths had changed and they now were required to look out for their votes at adjoining booths to be able to cast their votes.

For the same reason, polling got off to a very slow start and just about 5 per cent votes had been cast in the first two hours.

Dr Narotam Singh, the president of the Group of State Public Schools, said, "I and my wife had gone to Guru Amar Dass School, Model Town, this morning where we were told by the polling officers that we did not have our votes this time. We had cast our vote in the polling booth of this school in the Lok Sabha polls held in June. When we asked them to assist us in locating our booths, we were asked to check for our votes in two adjoining polling stations. We were already in a hurry because we had to travel to Chandigarh for some work. We could not run around checking for our booths and hence we chose to leave from there without casting our vote."

Even the workers of political parties sitting at party booths set up outside polling stations said, "Many voters are coming to us with their voter ID cards and enquiring about the location of their booths. We are helping them by scanning the lists available with us. There is more confusion this time as the wards and booths have changed and in the hurriedly convened election, the booth-level officers did not go door-to-door doing their duties and giving slips to the voters."

Aam Aadmi Party candidate from ward no. 33 and ex-councillor Aruna Arora said, "The voters have had some problem in locating their votes. Since the past two days, we tried to help them by sending them voter slips with their new vote number, ward number and booth locations at their places last evening. Our teams were able to cover 80 per cent of the houses. The rest could have had a problem".

Congress candidate Pawan Kumar said, "Other than locating the votes, we have had a problem of double votes getting registered in two separate wards. As candidates, we too faced problem as we somehow wrongly campaigned in 50 other houses of our adjoining ward."