A Shame. Bangalore poll turnout not even 50%

What a shame! Bangalore poll turnout did not even touch 50%. Can you beat it that Bangalore Rural had more voter turnout than the urban areas? The rural population has shown that they are more responsible than the high profile and highly educated urban folks. There is a difference of atleast 10 to 12% b/w rural and urban areas. Its quite shocking to see that the turnout is this low after several public campaigns like Jaagore, Aamir Khan’s ADR campaign, and other such organizations. You cant blame work because most companies had closed to allow their employees to vote. So, what else was needed to get more than half of the urban Bangalore to vote?

Look at the voter turnout figures below -
Bangalore Rural 57.92%
Bangalore North 46.78%
Bangalore South 44.73%
Bangalore Central 45.25%

Lets stop blaming the government or the politicians for the state of road, infrastructure, corruption etc. We are the ones who are allowing them to do so by not even taking a small effort to vote. We have no right to sit back and simply blame or point fingers.

The other problem was that many people who wanted to vote could not get their names in the electoral rolls. For god’s sake, someone should fix this because this happens during every election. Why is the process so cumbersome/unreliable to get one’s name in the rolls? One of my colleagues has tried 4 times and hasn’t been able to get his name.

One encouraging news I read in TOI today is that Chief Electoral officer M N Vidyashankar has identified this problem and plans to set up a 24×7 Help desk through BangaloreOne centres. This will function through the year and not just before elections to tackle voter woes.

I sincerely hope our people act more responsibly and the voter turnout for next polls are high, and hope that we end up having a government that we want to see.

Related posts:

1. Google and Jaagore launch an online voter list search engine