Hello,

With each passing day, the Election Commission of India’s Special Intensive Revision (SIR) looks like a disaster that no one knows how to control.

First, nearly 47.52 lakh voters were deleted. Then came another shock: another 33 lakh were flagged as doubtful voters for no-mapping and "logical discrepancies". Together, the two numbers make up more than half of Delhi's voters.

After The Reporters' Collective revealed that notices to doubtful VIP voters were being addressed quickly, the ECI, in damage-control mode, asked all booth-level officers (BLOs) to visit the homes of every Non-VIP voter too.

Since that direction, have BLOs, many of whom also teach in schools, been actually visiting each voter's home? And which booths across Delhi are the worst affected?

We analysed booth-level data on notices and found that half of Delhi's 14,946 BLOs have to track down at least 215 or more voters each. The worst case is a BLO in the Hari Nagar assembly constituency, who has to visit 741 voters.

Instead, BLOs are calling doubtful voters to their homes, to schools and to political party offices. They say they are helpless, and visiting every dubious voter’s home is practically impossible, as one case takes around 15-25 minutes to resolve.

They had to visit every voter's home again after doing the same during the enumeration phase. This shows the ECI's order was a knee-jerk reaction, issued without consulting its overworked BLOs.

The notices also mean the voter strength of several booths could fall drastically. For example, a booth in the Ballimaran assembly seat had 635 voters left in the draft rolls. Of them, 609 have been flagged.

Read the full investigation here: ECI’s Damage Control Pushes Delhi Citizens into Chaos. Again

For this investigation, we analysed 2.5 lakh pages of notices and met more than two dozen BLOs and doubtful voters. It takes time, resources and courage. We can do a lot more with your support. Please donate to The Reporters’ Collective.

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Warm regards,
Dikshya Koirala and Shivnarayan Rajpurohit
Reporters
The Reporters’ Collective

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Delhi SIR Chaos, Again

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