I came across lot of people, after the first phase of General Elections for the 15th Loksabha, who had problems in voting because they didnt know what to do. So I plan to key down some information I found out about voting to help those who are yet to vote in later phases of this election.
(I tried my level best to formulate the following procedures which many of you may know so please feel free to correct if you find any mistakes)
The ideal and the most probable situation:
First of all, let me give some background of how voting works. In many places, there will be many polling stations in a polling booth (like several examination halls in an exam center). Each polling station will have a set of voters allotted to them from the total voters allotted to that booth. So most of the political parties voluntarily undertake the task of identifying the station number of a particular voter (with the provisional voters list they have). All of them, most of the times, come to your address of residence and give you a white slip which contains the polling station number twenty four hours before the election day. If nobody gave it to you twenty four hours before, you can find the polling station number from various counters setup by political parties outside polling booth. With this information, you can wait in the correct queue to cast your vote.
Problem during the election day:
Even though you have a voter id card, sometimes your name might not appear in the provisional list the political parties have. Hence they cant provide you the polling station information. This need not necessarily mean that your name is not present in the official voter’s list inside the polling booth. It is because the provisional list is released one month before the elections and the final list might have some additions/deletions. In this case, you have to wait in a random queue (preferably queue with less number of people) till you get your chance and find out polling station information from the the polling officer.
If your vote is still missing, I am afraid it is.
If you have a voter id card with wrongly spelled name, please use the same to search in the list. Please dont try to tell them your correct name as sometimes the wrong spelling will not at all be similar to your original name and polling officer might challenge your vote.
Problems before election day:
The most comon problem will be: you still didnt get your voter id card. As you may know, you can still cast your vote by producing any of the government approved id cards like passport, PAN card, driving license, ration card to confirm your identity provided your name appears in “The Final List” they have. Most of the times, it will be. So find out the polling booth address from yours neighbours and check your name in the provisional list outside the booth in the “voluntary” counters as well as in the final list inside the booth.
The second problem is if you didnt receive your voter id card AND your name was actually misspelled in “The List”. In this case, you may sometimes think that your name isn’t really in the list. So try to keep an eye on the pages they are searching and identify your photo as the polling officer or the volunteers outside will not even look at you when trying to search the list. If you find your photo, show the relevant identification documents and dont hesitate to prove that the picture with a wrong spelling of your name is actually you with the ids you have.
Also please check the Voters’ guidelines for more detailed information. Also read about Electronic Voting Machines a.k.a EVMs to decrease the burden of the polling agent a bit and quicken the election process.
One final suggestion, go as early as possible.
Happy Voting 
