The Dravidian majors booth panels started operating last year to mobilize voters for Tennessee’s LS elections

Booth committee members of the Dravidian majors did it all in Tiruchy, as usual, from enrolling names in the voter list to making sure party supporters and regular voters showed up at the booth on election day. Even though five lakh electors did not show up to vote in the constituency, the DMK and AIADMK party members were crucial in drawing voters to the polling places.

 

In the Tiruchy seat, total voting decreased by 2% from the Lok Sabha election of 2019. However, because the parties have made every effort to guarantee voting turnout, the fault lies with voter relocation to other regions and inclement weather.

This time, the parties’ grassroots office bearers began work earlier in July 2023. They conducted special camps to verify the electoral register, and they went door-to-door to gather voter information for their booths.
“We organized camps last December to add the left-out names to the voter list and also carried out corrections of entries in the draft electoral roll released by the election commission,” said S Roshan, the secretary of the AIADMK for Ward 40 in the Thiruverumbur assembly segment.

“There are about ten booths in my ward that were assigned to ten booth committee members,” he went on. It was required of each of them to canvass at least one hundred voters. Their efforts may help our party gain ground in my community by bringing in around 300 new votes to my ward.”

“We started the field work 10 months ago, soon after the party held a statewide booth committee meeting led by MK Stalin in July 2023 in Tiruchy,” said Amjath, the DMK’s secretary for ward 27 in the Tiruchy West assembly district. Typically, we manage ward-wide additions, removals, and revisions to the electoral register.

However, we went above and above this time by contacting each individual on the voter list to find out their political preferences. To make it easier for us when we canvass votes, each member of our booth committee was requested to gather the information on the recipients of different government programs. We made certain that every household had at least one member who benefited from each plan.” Adding that it was not a big task—the DMK administration had put in place a number of programs for women, children, and the elderly—he said.

The AIADMK cadre were welcoming the excluded in order to win their support, while the DMK booth committee members were occupied with identifying the recipients of government programs.

In an effort to broaden our voting base, we not only engaged with our regular supporters but also with non-traditional voters. “We hope that this exercise would have resulted in votes,” a Beema Nagar-based DMK employee said.

Sivakumar, a BJP district leader in Tiruchy, said, “This time, we didn’t concentrate on compiling a list of prospective voters. Our party selected Sakthi Kendra leaders, who were tasked with forming booth committees, and boosted the number of workers at the grassroots level.”