AGRA, Oct. 30 -- Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) MLA from Agra Cantt GS Dharmesh on Wednesday alleged that there were nearly 60,000 fake or non-existent voters in his constituency's electoral rolls. He demanded FIRs and salary suspension of booth-level officers (BLOs) negligent in performing their duties, holding them responsible for "large-scale irregularities" in the voter list. Dharmesh said he had personally analysed records of 65 out of 469 booths in Agra Cantt, which together have 45,521 voters, and found 5,400 women still listed as voters at their parents' addresses despite likely being married and registered elsewhere. Another 949 voters appeared twice, with names featuring in multiple booths, he pointed out. "When these 6,349 names are removed, the actual number of voters in those 65 booths comes down to 39,172. On an average, about 95 names per booth are invalid. Applying this average to all 469 booths, around 44,555 voters should have been deleted," said Dharmesh, who is also a former cabinet minister in UP. He added that the figure would be close to 60,000 if deceased voters and tenants who had moved out were also counted. "After my defeat in the 2012 assembly elections, I got 30,000 fake names deleted; otherwise, this number would have touched 90,000," he claimed. Dharmesh said that despite the Election Commission's guidelines, several BLOs avoided door-to-door verification, resulting in the continued presence of names that should have been deleted. "Many names remain on the list because BLOs do not visit households for verification. Often, when booth-level agents approach them with Form 7 for deletion, they wrongly claim that they can remove only four or five names at a time, though no such restriction exists," he said. htc...