Andhra Pradesh Chief Election Officer Gopalakrishna Dwivedi clarified about the usage of Form-7 while deleting voters from the Electoral list. He said that there was nothing wrong in deleting the names of voters who were registered twice or fake voters, and so submitting Form-7 to delete their names was technically correct.

They were also given as a part of verification, and just because the forms were given it did not mean that they were going to delete the names. Any name would be thoroughly scrutinised and verified. If the data was false or incorrect then the names would be deleted from the electoral list he clarified.

His statements clear the air about Chandrababu Naidu comments that Form-7 was illegal. Dwivedi also clarified that it was illegal to issue a Form-7 in the name of the voter without his/her knowledge by another person.

He added that the cases were registered against such bogus forms and the numbers of Form-7 petitions have reduced. Till date, only ten thousand votes were deleted and the EC has allowed 40,000 voters’ names to be deleted from the electoral rolls so far.

He also clarified that an application of Form-7 submitted online does not qualify or indicate that the voters' name has been deleted and that it was only a submission of the form. The CEO said that in a ratio between the AP population and the voters, the voters are much lesser.

He appealed to the young voters who have attained 18 years of age to come forward and register themselves.

The state has received a large number of Form-7 applications. But after the Data theft case erupted the number of Form-7 applications declined gradually. A total of 8.76 lakh form-7 applications were received.

These forms were being checked thoroughly with 45,000 personnel on the job. So far, 1,61,005 applications were examined, out of which only 5,309 were confirmed as original applications. The other 1,55,696 applications were found to be fake and rejected.

The Chief Electoral Officer of the state said that complete examination and scrutiny of the applications would be completed within four to five days.

The Chief Election Commissioner of the state Dwivedi said that the issue of the voter data deletion in Andhra Pradesh brought to the notice of the Central Election Commission, he concluded.

Also Read: Chandrababu Trying To Confuse People Over Form-7: YSRCP