Homeless voters: CEC Gyanesh Kumar has egg on his face

At his press conference on Sunday, Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) Gyanesh Kumar had explained away the strange phenomenon of voters’ lists replete with thousands of voters’ addresses denoted by houses numbered ‘zero’ or ‘double zero’. They were not fake voters as apprehended by the Opposition, he said, but actually homeless.

The explanation was dubious because the homeless and destitute rarely live in the same spot. They are often driven away by the police and move in search of work or collect waste and garbage or do odd jobs for food. They often shift from one city to another and, above all, exercising their right to franchise is usually the least of their priorities.

On Monday, news portal Journo Mirror posted a 21-minute video on its YouTube channel on the homeless in Delhi, the national capital. The attempt was to confirm the CEC’s claim that houses numbered ‘zero’ or ‘double zero’ belong to voters who live under flyovers and on footpaths. He explained that the enlightened Election Commission does not want to leave out any Indian and hence accepts the homeless too as voters.

Strangely, or not so strangely, most of the homeless the portal’s reporter spoke to said they did not have voters’ cards or ration cards. Hari Singh from Rajasthan and Ravi Dutt from Bihar claimed that they have lived in Delhi for the past 40-45 years but do not have the Electors’ Photo Identity Card (EPIC). Surprisingly, one such homeless man claimed he had both Aadhaar as well as PAN but not EPIC. Nobody had approached them for registering as voters either.

Most of the homeless claimed they had come to Delhi in search of a better life and work. While some of them have indeed lived under the same flyover for years, they have neither benefitted from housing schemes nor other welfare schemes of the government. The voters with house numbers ‘zero’ or ‘double zero’ do not seem to exist and cannot obviously be traced.

The question is, why the Election Commission cannot record their home addresses as ‘below such and such flyover’ or ‘on the western corner of the footpath on such and such road’.

How do you track down the CEC’s homeless voters with just their names and a photograph? How do we know that these voters are actually casting votes or their votes are cast by others?