DEHRADUN: Defence and paramilitary personnel have welcomed the Election Commission ’s move to extend the Electronic Transmitted Postal Ballot service in the Uttarakhand assembly elections.Under this system, the service voters will receive a downloadable postal ballot through electronic medium, and the votes thus cast will be received by returning officers through post.Although serving defence and paramilitary personnel, who form a sizable population in Uttarakhand, welcomed the initiative, some of them said that many personnel are unable to use the postal ballot system due to lack of awareness, and therefore, there is a need to sensitise them.However, the number of service electorates casting their votes through postal ballots in the past two elections has been encouraging. In the 2012 Uttarakhand assembly elections, out of the total 4,26,3017 electorates, 43,323 were service voters; whereas in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, out of the total 83,40,82,814 voters across the country, 13,65,635 were postal ballot voters.Havaldar Parminder Singh, a native of Udham Singh Nagar, who has been posted in Jammu and Kashmir, told TOI, “I have never used the postal ballot service as I was not even aware of the existence of such a service.” Singh added, “If we are able to download a postal ballot, then it will be easier to cast our votes provided the internet is working, which is not the case here most of the times.”Service voters, who have an option of casting their votes through proxy or postal ballot, will now be able to download a postal ballot through a secure electronic medium using a 'One Time Password (OTP)' sent on their mobile phones or emails and can send their ballots after casting votes to the returning officer through post.According to the EC, there are a total of 74,88,101 voters in Uttarakhand for the 2017 elections, of which 10,71,01 are service voters.Col SC Tyagi (retd) said, “Lack of basic awareness among defence personnel is the main reason behind limited use of this facility. We have had the option of casting votes through postal ballot for many years, but I hardly came across any jawan or officer who had used it. In fact, many of them are not even aware of it. But in this age of digitisation, the online postal ballot might actually help a lot.”“The online option will give more opportunity to defence personnel serving far from their domicile state. The process, which earlier used to take almost a month, has now been reduced to a week or so. I had tried the postal service ballot once, but that reached the centre after the polling ended,” said a serving army officer on condition of anonymity.