After a month full of election campaigns and candidates coming to Suncity requesting people to come out and vote, the polling day saw just approximately 30% of votes from residents.
Even during the day, appeals were being made asking residents to come out and vote. The reason for low registered votes is not necessarily a low voter turnout.
Surprisingly, a lot of residents who had even cast their votes during the MLA election did not find their names in the voter lists. On reaching the polling station, they were surprised to see that their name was not on the voter list, and they could not cast their vote. Another reason for this drop was having different polling stations for members of the same family. There were cases where out of 3 members of the family, all 3 had different polling stations, making it extremely inconvenient to vote. There were also cases where the same resident’s name was in multiple lists.
The situation was not unique to only Suncity; citizens across Gurugram were struggling with these issues on Sunday, which has led to a drop in votes cast. Adjoining villages, however, have seen a high voter turnout of over 70%, increasing the gap between the urban and rural voting. The question remains, will elected representatives focus their energies on our posh localities after such a low number of votes? Or will they focus themselves on the adjoining villages where the majority of votes are coming from?
