Sudipto Mondal/The Hindu

• Names of several people missing in the voters’ list

Mangalore, Apr 25: The distribution of electoral photo identity cards (EPIC) may provide some comic relief to people with a sense of humour but a strife for those at the receiving end.

When Sajida Bano (26) was informed on Thursday that she had already been given her EPIC, countless thoughts came to her mind.

“I am here in front of you. How can you say that you have already given me the ID card? Has someone impersonated me?” she asked the volunteers at a centre in Someshwar. But before she could complete her sentence, the next person in the queue had replaced her in front of the camera. Ruffled by the incident, Ms. Bano said: “When I approached the front desk, I was given a slip with a number written on it and sent for photographing. At the photography counter, the volunteer entered the number into the computer which showed that ID card could not be generated as voter was not in first residual list.”

The Assistant Commissioner and Electoral Registration Officer for Mangalore Sub-Division, Sameer Shukla, said that this message appeared on the computer monitor when a person had already been issued a photo identity card .

But when he was apprised of the plight of Ms. Sajida Bano, he said: “I have got all kinds of complaints so far but this is the first of its kind.”

In one hour that this team from The Hindu spent at the centre, several bloopers emerged, most common were errors in spelling.

For instance, people who fed F.M. Ismael’s name in to the system also took the trouble of spelling out his initial alphabets and so his name appeared in the card as, “Ef Em Ismael”.