The BJP has requested the Election Commission to allow any voter of Bengal, irrespective of where they are enrolled as voters, to be deployed as polling agents anywhere across the state.

The plea, BJP insiders conceded, exposed the organisational weakness of the party at the booth level.

“If the candidate doesn’t need to be a voter of the Assembly he or she is contesting from, why should there be specifications for the agent?” asked BJP leader Sisir Bajoria, who was part of the team of representatives from the party that met the Election Commission full bench on Thursday.

According to him, the request to change the existing rule, which makes only a voter of an Assembly segment eligible as a polling agent at booths, has been placed in front of the EC that met representatives of all political parties during its visit to Bengal.

BJP sources said the party’s leadership believed that only if the condition was relaxed and any voter of the state was allowed to work as a polling agent anywhere, it would be easier for the party to depute polling agents across booths in the state.

“We hope the EC will listen to our demand.... But we cannot deny the fact that we are still weak organisationally and do not have booth levels workers to post them as polling agents at over 1lakh voting stations across the state,” said a source.

According to a BJP office-bearer, even after winning 18 of the 42 Lok Sabha seats in Bengal in 2019, only 66 per cent of the booths have been covered in the past two years.

“We still don’t have a proper organisation in around 34 per cent booth areas,” this person said.

The Covid-19 pandemic has prompted the EC to restrict the number of voters per booth to not more than 1000, instead of 1,500 earlier. Hence, the number of booths has gone up to 1,01,790 from 78,903 previously.