The Election Commission will start updating the voter list of Dhaka City Corporation from today.
Supervisors will start making door-to-door visits and the process will continue until September 10.
The process for taking photographs of new voters of Dhaka South City Corporation (DSCC) and Dhaka North City Corporation (DNCC) will start from September 18, Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) Kazi Rakibuddin Ahmed said at a press conference in his office yesterday.
He said: “It is a continuous process. If anyone fails to update his information within the deadline they can update that after the session. And Bangladeshi nationals who are residents in foreign countriescan also enlist themselves anytime before the election by going to the upazila or thana election offices in they happen to be in the country.”
The CEC confirmed that during the first phase of updating, 181 upazila have already been covered and now they are in the third phase where they are going to start updating information of voters in 120 upazilas. Ninety-two upazilas are yet to be covered under the second phase, he said.
CEC warned everyone to avoid having dual voter enlistment. Anyone found doing so would be penalised.
The Election Commission has found that the number of female voters are decreasing daily.
Kazi Rakibuddin Ahmed said the reasons behind this are, firstly parents tend to avoid mentioning the age of their daughters, secondly most of the rural female voters are conservative and thirdly, some of them deny being photographed because of religious reasons.
Day labourers will not be included in this updating process as they create confusion while providing permanent address. The local governments have been informed about the issues, he said.
According to CEC’s statistics, 3,082,287 new voters have been enlisted so far of whom 17,59,233 are male