Hello,
We have proved again and again how the Election Commission of India has no plan of action when it comes to conducting its unprecedented voter roll revision across the country. Each week, we learn that the Commission has modified rules yet again, forcing its bureaucracy to even admit that ECI’s tangle of contradictory orders is becoming hard to follow.
Most reports in the media have been charting ECI’s contradictions in a piecemeal fashion. For the first time ever, in this ground report from West Bengal, we untangle ECI’s exercise of obfuscation from the beginning to the end.
The Reporters’ Collective has established, with granular evidence, how the Election Commission of India (ECI) tailored the voter roll revision in West Bengal with unfettered discretion. It changed rules and regulations through the course of the revision exercise. It trammeled over the powers of the statutory officials in charge of voter rolls in the assembly. Midway, it superimposed election officials from Kolkata to districts undergoing Special Intensive Revision. The statutory decision-making authorities were either turned into rubber stamps or rendered powerless intermediaries.
The ECI in West Bengal did not run the SIR in a vacuum of rules, rather it imposed a cascade of orders that kept bending and morphing the process to a point where officials administering the process could not keep up. None of these intermittent orders was made public.
Some of these changes were made in writing, but most went through via informal oral orders or more insidiously in real time updates to ECI’s centralised software used to run the unprecedented revision exercise.
Read our latest investigation here: How ECI tailored the voter registration in West Bengal “as it deemed fit”
Since last year, under our Electoral Roll Project, we have consistently highlighted the whims and fancies on which the SIR is being conducted without transparent rules and regulations.
We owe it to our friends and supporters, such as you, who made these investigations possible with your resources and ideas. Please continue to read our work and support us.
Warm Regards,
Ayushi Kar
Reporter
The Reporters’ Collective