Till last minute, candidates tried to influence voters

NAGPUR: Political parties and candidates were seen influencing voters till the last minute on V-Day. All utilized smart technologies, machinery and money power to outdo each other.
Tension prevailed for sometime in ward No. 14 in West Nagpur where supporters of three candidates — Kamlesh Chaudhary, Saraswati Salame (both Congress) and Sumidha Pandey from NCP — alleged that BJP candidate Pragati Patil ferried voters to her house and distributed money.
Police from Gittikhadan rushed to Patil’s residence and even conducted a search. “Voters hailing from Ramgiri slum were detained at Patil’s house and brought to the police station. They said they were given Rs400 each, but did not accept it. As no complaint was filed, the matter was not investigated into,” said police sources.
Patil’s rivals recorded a video in which voters were brought to her residence in a posh car. It showed people being taken inside Patil’s house and then returning to the car.
Denying the allegations, Patil, who was with the NCP until a few days ago, said, “It seems my opponents brought some voters to my house.”
Rajkumar Borkar, a resident of Ramgiri slum, told TOI he thought all were being taken to a polling booth. “But we were brought to Patil’s house. Some people stopped us as soon as we reached here,” he said.
Many candidates engaged vehicles to bring voters from residential areas especially slums to polling booths and dropped them back. They were served breakfast and drinking water in the vehicles. Parties also sent out bulk SMSes to voters.
Several candidates erected pandals not very far from the polling booths. Those manning it would hail people and provide them voters’ slips. Candidates’ names and symbol was displayed in the slips. Some voters even carried the slips into the polling booths. The BJP candidates’ pandals had party colours on it.
Candidates of BJP, Congress, Shiv Sena and NCP used laptops and apps to help voters in locating their booths. The candidates downloaded booth-wise voters list from the NMC and State Election Commission (SEC) website and uploaded it into their systems. In ward no. 37, BJP activists even used ticketing machines to find voters’ name and print slips.
BJP city unit reportedly developed a third party app — BJP 19 — to trace voters. The app was not available on Google playstore and had to be installed through ‘Share It’ social media. Voters were traced by entering surnames, caste, voter IDs and areas.
Some party members claimed the app got leaked among workers of other parties too. However, this app too had glitches, mostly due to wrong spellings of voters.
In a few locations, Congress activists were seen using ‘Rajyakarta‘ app to locate voters’ names and polling booths.
Municipal commissioner Shravan Hardikar said no complaints were received throughout the day and action will be initiated if any comes to fore.
(inputs from Manka Behl)