The Congress has once again questioned the validity of the Special Intensive Revision in Bihar, citing the presence of what the opposition party calls over five lakh duplicate voters in the final electoral rolls published by the Election Commission of India for the upcoming Assembly polls in the state.
The Bihar Assembly elections will be held in two phases on November 6 and 11 and the counting will be on November 14.
“As per our analysis, there are more than five lakh duplicate (same name, same relative, age, gender and address) voters in the final list published,” the party’s Empowered Action Group of Leaders and Experts aka EAGLE said in a statement released on Wednesday night. “What was the point if SIR if there are still more than five lakh duplicates? How will ECI verify and clean these now.”
The expert group asked why the Election Commission has not yet made available the final list of all deleted voters and their details by booth and category.
“In total 67.3 lakh voters have been deleted in the SIR exercise. More than one-tenth of these deletions are in just 15 Assembly constituencies,” said the Congress group’s statement.
“The EC has not made available a machine-readable voter list which makes any analysis of the voter list very cumbersome. Further, the EC did not make the voter list available as one consolidated list but released it as 90,000 separate individual files in image format. Why is the EC so hesitant to make voter lists easy to analyse? What is it scared of?”
After the conclusion of the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) based on citizenship documents, names of 68.66 lakh voters were deleted from the existing rolls while another 21.53 lakh new voters were added.
The final electoral roll was revised at 7.42 crore from the previous 7.89 crore. The electoral rolls were published on September 30.
The Supreme Court has asked the EC to respond to the allegations about the final voter list, where the petitioners opposing the SIR argued that the additions and deletions were carried out without due diligence.
The matter is to come up before the apex court on Thursday.
The Congress’s expert group stated that in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections 7.72 crore voters were registered in Bihar.
“On a net basis 30 lakh people of Bihar who were registered as voters for the Lok Sabha elections are no longer voters for the Vidhan Sabha election. Who are these 30 lakh people? How many of these people voted in Bihar for the Lok Sabha 2024 election,” the party asked through the expert group.
Rajya Sabha MP and former Union minister P. Chidambaram had some more questions for the central poll panel.
“What is the estimate of the adult population of Bihar according to the government of India? What proportion of the adult population has been included in the Bihar electoral rolls? Is it 90.7 per cent? What about the remaining 9.3 per cent of the adult population? Why are they not included in the electoral rolls?” Chidambaram asked on his X (formerly Twitter) handle on Thursday, with the caveat that he wasn’t accusing the EC of any wrongdoing.
“The people of India and Bihar are entitled to answers to the questions on the Bihar electoral rolls.”
Chidambaram also asked, “How many names in the electoral rolls are gibberish? Is the number approximately 24,000? How many house numbers in the electoral rolls are blank or obviously invalid? Is the number over 2,00,000? How many names included in the electoral rolls are double or duplicate entries? Is the number approximately 5,20,000?”
The Congress’s expert group also pointed to discrepancies in the number of new voters added and the forms distributed for the same.
“EC claims 21.53 lakh voters were added in Bihar, but Form 6 is available for only 16.93 lakh. Where are the remaining 4.6 lakh forms? Were these added without due process?” the Congress asked.
The Congress has demanded no new voter be added after the last date of applications decided by the EC up to 10 days before the last date of nominations.
