My experience as a poll booth agent and an one-day volunteer of Aam Aadmi Party
I volunteered to be a polling agent for Aam Aadmi Party at the Mahadevapura constituency near the Chinnapanahalli Railway Gate (Thanks to Vinodh and Sanjeeth for the inspiration). I was called for an half hour training on what to do as an agent, which YouTube videos I should watch to prepare myself and I was given a document saying that I was representing AAP. I was given a kit with some handouts.
The campaign managers and coordinators of AAP did an amazing job in this. Just look at the pictures below, see level of details and planning that went behind this.
I reached the booth at 5:45 AM and everything was in place. The electronic voting machines were installed, the posters, benches and card boards to secure the EVM area, everything was perfectly done by the Presiding Officer and her colleagues. They must have started their work at 4:30 AM itself.
After enrolling as a polling agent, I had to check with the EVMs are working fine, so the officer conducted a mock poll for me. I had to vote for every candidate (27 candidates in total) 2 times. Every vote takes 10 seconds to register and the officer had to open the ballot after every vote. (It is not very easy to fake a vote unless the presiding officer is hands in glove with you.)
After this long exercise was done, the officer showed me the result of the poll in the control unit. Meanwhile, the polling agents from BJP and Congress also joined me. The officer deleted the results of the mock poll and sealed the machine. I signed a document saying the mock poll was fair and I was satisfied with the EVMs.
Now my job was to sit in the corner with the voters detail and tick-off when the presiding officer tells about the voter who is walking into the booth. I could raise my objection over the identity of a person, if I find it dubious. Everything was going smooth and it was almost 9:30AM so I had to step out of the booth and double up as a desk volunteer 100 meters outside the polling booth along with Sanjeeth.
We wore the AAP topi, opened up our laptop with the voter details PDF and displayed the AAP poster with Balakrishnan’s name on it. The BJP and the Congress workers were surprised at us, as they thought party symbols and flags should not be displayed. (As per EC norms its not allowed to do with 100 meters of the polling booth, but were quite far from the booth)
Many people came to our desk as we could search the PDF based on their name/number and tell the serial number. BJP and Congress both had the listed printed out but it is impossible to search based on name and number as there were 2500 entries in total (two polling booths, so 1250 per booth). Soon, the workers of BJP and Congress, themselves directed people to our booth, as people were quite impatient.
At around 2PM noon, the BJP workers got the banners, flags, caps and a laptop too.
I was really impressed by many people who were enthusiastic about voting. A Muslim lady traveled all the way from Hopefarm to the booth, where I was volunteering to check if her name was in the rolls of this booth, as she has not got the Voter ID card yet. It was the third booth in which she was checking. I directed her to the next booth, as I could not find in the rolls of my booth.
Frequent questions asked to me by the Congress workers and the policemen was: how much do you get paid for being a polling agent from AAP?. My reply to them was the desk, Table Mate, that I was using is my own personal desk and we are all part time volunteers.
When I had stepped out for lunch, one Congress worker asked Sanjeeth, then why do you work if you don’t get paid. I could imagine what would have been the expression in Sanjeeth’s face :-)
A couple came and they were highly enthusiastic too. The lady asked my name is in rolls at my native can I vote from here. I smiled and said no. She again said, “We have Aadhaar Card. Can’t we vote in this booth?”. Then she said, “Don’t we have any process to vote online?”. All I could do was smile back and say not yet.
Hope the election commission makes an effort in next decades for the people to vote online, as we already have embraced the electronic voting technology.
Total number of voters in my polling booth was 1258 and till 5:30PM in the evening the number of voters who turned up was just 632. While people were lamenting and cursing the IT middle class for not turning up for voting in Bangalore, I found something really odd in the voters list. Just a cursory glance through the list I found two duplicate entries. Many entries in the list were of people who have already moved out of Bangalore. I really don’t know whether any cleansing or de-duplication was done on this data. Its worth reading Ashwin Mahesh’s article about this.
At 6:30PM, all the polling agents were called, the total votes polled were shown and in front of us, the machines were disassembled. The control unit and EVMs was kept in a secure box and sealed off. I was given a certificate saying how many votes were polled. Total of 632 votes out of 1258 were casted. 350 were male and 282 were female.
Even though, everything went on smooth and fair inside the polling booth, I was told that the BJP coordinator of that area, slyly stuck some cash into the pocket of the policeman who was manning the booth. I really didn’t know why this happened and what else could a polling agent do to tweak the numbers here.
Apart from the last incident, I had an eventful and tiresome day but I thoroughly enjoyed the role as a polling agent for the AAP. I am mightily impressed by the way AAP people had planned the process and executed it. I sincerely hope they get some share of the power and effect some change in our political process.