Hello,
The Election Commission of India’s (ECI) electoral roll purification exercise, Special Intensive Revision (SIR), was supposed to clean up Bihar’s voter roll. However, the poorly-conducted exercise now resembles a ‘fish stuck in the throat’ situation, where the ECI is just not ready to accept the glaring errors in the process.
On September 30, the final electoral roll for Bihar was released by the ECI. Compared to the pre-SIR electoral roll, there has been a deletion of 68.66 lakh voters.
Bihar’s total voters now stand at 7.42 crore, after the deletion of 68.66 lakh voters, and the addition of 21.53 lakh voters. The State goes to the polls in two phases on November 6 and 11.
Our latest analysis of the final published electoral roll for the 243 assembly constituencies shows there are more than 14.35 lakh suspect duplicate voters - those who have two different voter IDs but with the same names, the same name of a relative, and an age difference of 0-5 years. Of these, about 3.42 lakh duplicates were those where the ages on both voter IDs matched perfectly.
The analysis by The Reporters’ Collective and an independent team of experts reveals that around 1.32 crore voters are registered on dubious and non-existent addresses.
Read it here: The mess, called ECI’s final voter list for Bihar
We started following the story in July, and since then, we have consistently exposed the ECI’s botched-up exercise. We also covered the issue on the ground in Bihar to verify the findings of our analysis.
Under our Electoral Roll Project, we covered the issue from several aspects and published a series of stories. After Bihar, the ECI has announced that it will conduct SIR across India. We will follow it to see how it unfolds.
However, we could not have done it alone. We are a determined team, but we face a severe financial crunch. This project became possible due to your generous donations, support, and suggestions. Please support us so that we can continue our investigation into the poorly-conducted SIR and seek accountability from the powerful.
Warm Regards,
Mayank Aggarwal
Editor
The Reporters’ Collective