The Election Commission on Tuesday held a video conference with district election officers (DEOs) to discuss arrangements made for serving hearing notices on 95 lakh voters whose enumeration forms for the special intensive revision (SIR) had “logical discrepancies”.

Sources said that the EC had asked the DEOs, who are also district magistrates, to download notices for all voters with “logical discrepancies” in their SIR forms in the next four-five days, as officials considered the task of conducting hearings for such a huge number of voters over the next month a big challenge.

“The hearing and verification phase will continue till February 7, and the final electoral rolls will be published on February 14. It is a Herculean task to conduct the hearing and verification of the documents of so many voters. The verification of documents particularly progresses at a slow pace,” said a district official associated with the hearing of voters.

Sources said at present, the EC was conducting hearings of 32 lakh unmapped voters, who could not link themselves to the 2002 electoral rolls through self or progeny mapping. So far, hearings of more than 21 lakh unmapped voters have been completed, but documents of only 5 lakh voters were uploaded for verification. This cannot be considered a speedy disposal
of cases.

“In likelihood, the EC will soon issue a directive to upload documents and dispose of cases at the earliest. If the process is not expedited, hearing of so many voters with logical discrepancies would be a real challenge for the poll panel,” said a source.

Soon after the draft rolls were published on December 16, the EC had flagged 1.67 crore voters with “logical discrepancies” in their enumeration forms while deleting nearly 58 lakh names from the draft rolls as they were marked as dead, shifted, absent or duplicate. The poll panel tried to clear their doubts on these voters through verification by the booth-level officers (BLOs).

“After verification by the BLOs, the figure was brought down to 95 lakh as the poll panel cleared doubts over about 72 lakh voters with spelling errors or gender mismatch. But the suspicion of 95 lakh voters could not be cleared, and that’s why so many voters with logical discrepancies would have to be called for the hearing,” said a poll panel source.

Of these 95 lakh voters, 24.21 lakh would be called as at least six or more voters had mapped themselves to the same parent enrolled in the 2002 post-SIR rolls.

“Doubts on them could not be cleared as many of the parents, who were linked by so many voters, said that he or she did not know the majority of them. So it was decided that all such voters would be called for a hearing,” said a source.

Apart from these, 11.95 lakh voters linked themselves to voters in the 2002 rolls, who are older by 15 years or less.

“The poll panel could not clear its doubts on these voters as no appropriate documents could be submitted by the BLOs,” said another source.

In addition to these, there are approximately 8.77 lakh voters who linked themselves to voters from the 2002 rolls as parents, but their age gap exceeded 50 years. This section of voters would also be called for a hearing, as the poll panel felt the age gap to be doubtful. Another 3.29 lakh voters also came under scrutiny as they linked themselves to voters of the 2002 rolls as their grandparents, but their age gap was less than 40 years.