The Election Commission has ordered district election officers and electoral registration officers to conduct progeny mapping at all polling booths after discovering widespread discrepancies in parental information for voters listed in the 2025 rolls but absent from the 2002 rolls.
The scale of discrepancies — potentially affecting up to 30 lakh voters, according to sources — has prompted the poll panel to deploy booth-level officers to verify all suspect cases. The officers must submit their reports within seven days as part of efforts to prepare error-free electoral rolls before the Assembly polls.
An official explained the issue that caught the EC’s attention: many 2025 voters who don’t appear in the 2002 rolls have linked themselves to 2002 voters as their parents, but these links contradict the parental names listed in their current 2025 records.
“As the number of such cases is very high, the poll panel could not bypass it,” said
a bureaucrat.
For example, a voter named Rabi Mondal (name changed) appears in the 2025 rolls with his father listed as Prabhat Mondal. However, in his enumeration form, Rabi identified Gora Mondal — a person from the 2002 rolls — as his father.
The IT team at Nirvachan Sadan in Delhi first detected the large-scale discrepancies after most enumeration forms from the state’s 7.66 crore voters were uploaded. The team alerted Bengal chief electoral officer Manoj Agarwal, whose office conducted sample checks that revealed the problem was widespread. This prompted the order for booth-wise progeny mapping.
“The discrepancy has been flagged by the IT team in Delhi and some other sample cases were sent to the Bengal CEO for his consideration. After a sample check, it was found that the problem existed in almost all the booths,” the official said.
Booth-level officers will now visit the homes of affected voters to investigate why they linked themselves to parents whose names don’t match those in existing rolls. The BLOs will submit reports to assistant electoral registration officers or EROs.
If these names still appear in the draft rolls, voters will be called for hearings where they must explain the discrepancy.
An ERO from Murshidabad suggested that while some voters may have mistakenly written incorrect parental names, many appear to have done so deliberately to avoid scrutiny during verification and hearing phases.
“The EC has declared that voters who figured in 2002 lists and their children would not be required to submit any paper or face hearings during the special intensive revision of rolls,” explained an official. “Now, voters who don’t have the required papers or somehow managed to get their names in the electoral rolls after 2002 are desperately trying to avoid hearing by linking their names with the voters of the 2002 rolls.”
Pre-special intensive revision (SIR) mapping showed that about 2.4 crore voters are common to both the 2002 and the 2025 rolls. Officials estimated that roughly 2 crore voters who are the progeny of these electors would be able to establish legitimate links to the 2002 rolls through their parents.
However, after 97.34% of forms were digitised statewide, far more voters claimed links to the 2002 rolls than expected —and sample checking revealed numerous
mismatches.
“It appears that many more voters have linked themselves with the 2002 rolls than the estimated number. The sample checking revealed that there were several mismatches,” said an official.