Nearly 3.5 lakh among the 31.68 lakh Bengal voters who did not link themselves with the 2002 electoral rolls through self or progeny mapping failed to turn up for hearings on the dates mentioned in the notices served on them.

With the initial deadline for the hearings for unmapped voters ending on Thursday — before the Election Commission announced an extension till February 7 — there's suspicion that bogus voters still exist on the post-SIR draft rolls.

“It is surprising that more than 10 per cent of the unmapped voters did not appear for hearings. It's yet to be ascertained why," a poll official said.

"But the possibility of many of them being fictitious or ghost voters cannot be ruled out. The commission had detected a significant number of fictitious voters in some Assembly segments during the summary revision of rolls before the SIR started."

Poll panel officials said those who had not appeared for hearings would have a chance to do so if they applied to the BLOs for slots by February 7. "But for this, they will have to cite a valid reason why they had missed the previous date,” an official said.

Another official said some people may have missed their hearings because of family emergencies or because they were out of town. However, it's unlikely that 3.5 lakh people would miss their hearings because of emergencies, he argued.

“This is why the poll panel is not ruling out any possibility. As the poll panel had identified many fictitious voters on the electoral rolls even before the SIR started, the possibility of (more) fictitious voters cannot be ruled out,” the official said.

The question is being asked how these bogus voters made it to the post-SIR draft rolls, as the BLOs had uploaded enumeration forms bearing these names.

“The poll panel had received several complaints about BLOs being forced to upload many enumeration forms under pressure from political leaders. Several of these enumeration forms had the names of dead voters,” a source said.

Before the SIR began, the Bengal chief electoral officer’s office had conducted a sample survey of the electoral rolls in four Assembly segments — Baruipur East, Rajarhat-Gopalpur, Moyna and Nandakumar.

The survey showed that more than 100 fictitious voters had been included in each of the Assembly segments between April and July last year by four Bengal officials assigned to add people to the electoral rolls after verification.

Based on these findings, the commission had asked the Bengal chief secretary to suspend and lodge FIRs against these four officials — the two election registration officers and two assistant EROs for Baruipur East and Moyna.