Hello,
The Election Commission recently responded to our investigation, which found countless duplicate voters in Bihar’s final voter list, even after the special intensive revision.
Our investigation had revealed that ECI had skipped a crucial step. Parsing voter lists through an automatic check to find suspect duplicates.
In response, ECI immediately discredited its own deduplication software. Telling the Supreme Court that its method to manually find duplicates in Bihar SIR was far superior to “random search by software.”
Like always, ECI produced no audit or evidence to substantiate this claim.
In our investigative series on Bihar SIR, we found 14.35 lakh suspect duplicates in the state’s final voter list. We then went on the ground to verify several cases of voters with two or more IDs. This is the voter list that was used in the recently concluded assembly elections earlier in November.
SIR is ongoing in 12 states and union territories. Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar has underlined that no deduplication software will be used in this second phase as well.
Read the latest in our ongoing investigation on SIR – ECI to Supreme Court: Deduplication Software Was Ineffective, We Scraped It.
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. Our stories are making it to the apex court and compelling the ECI to respond.
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,
Ayushi Kar
Reporter
The Reporters’ Collective