Patna, Bihar & New Delhi: Following its drive claiming to "purify" Bihar's voter database, the Election Commission of India (ECI) has issued two voter identity numbers to 20-year-old Anjali Kumari from the Triveniganj assembly constituency in Bihar.

Against two of her voter identity numbers, the ECI has put down the same details. Her husband’s name, her age, and her address match. Incredulously, she is registered at the same polling booth to vote twice in the upcoming assembly elections. 

Anjali’s extra voter identity is a product of the hastily carried out Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of the state’s electoral roll. SIR is an unprecedented exercise that the ECI promises to carry out next in the entire country at the same pace and with the same method. 

If Anjali’s case was an exception, or even if there were only a handful of such cases, they could be passed off as an error that does not blemish ECI’s claims. But they are not, our latest investigation into the controversial SIR  of Bihar voter roll has found.

The Reporters’ Collective examined the draft electoral rolls of 15 assembly constituencies in Bihar. We found over 34,392 cases where the same person has been provided two unique identities to vote twice in the same assembly constituency. In each of these cases, we found that the voter has been registered twice on the draft voter list with the same name, relative’s name and the age either matching or ranging between 1-5 years.  

In another 13,898 cases across these 15 constituencies, persons have been given two voter identities with the same name and relative’s name, but the age differs on the two voter identities by 5-10 years. 

There are yet another 19,536 cases of potential double voters, where the names of the voter and their relative are a perfect match and the difference in age recorded against two identities is more than 10 years. These are the least strongest case of duplication of the three, given that these could indeed be two separate individuals in certain cases. 

This totals to 67,826 cases of twice-registered dubious and potentially illegal voters across the three categories. 

For the 15 constituencies, we found 1,500-3,000 matches within the 0-5 year age difference range and 800-1,000 matches in the 6-10 year age difference range. 

Typically, an assembly constituency in Bihar has 2 to 3 lakh voters. Statistically, there should only be a handful of cases where two separate individuals exist, who have the same name, relative’s name as well as similar ages. But our investigation has thrown-up thousands of cases of near matches per assembly constituency.

Going by the number of twice-registered voters we found in the 15 constituencies, a detailed analysis of all the 243 assembly constituencies could throw up lakhs of potential double voters across the state. 

As journalists, we do not have the resources to individually verify in each of the 67,500-plus cases, which are entirely fraudulent, where one person holds two voter cards illegally, or where, in rare cases, two separate people have the same registered, genuine credentials. For now, we can summarise from the review of 15 constituencies that a significant portion of these tens of thousands of people could be those who can vote twice in the upcoming assembly elections. Unless they are taken off the final voter list by the ECI. 

The chances of that happening are low. The ECI at its Delhi Headquarters, and its officials at the state and district level, are required to identify double voters (terms as ‘demographic similar entries’ in its jargon) using sophisticated computer programs and ground verification, before the draft list of voters is prepared for a state. That stage has passed, and ECI claims it has removed 7 lakh duplicate voters, suggesting that there is no more cleaning of the voter list it needs to do on this count.

We investigated in collaboration with a team of independent data analysts who helped us parse through Bihar’s electoral roll. The ECI had put an extra effort to prevent the data from being read at scale by computers for such analysis. Our data analysts broke the digital padlocks ECI had put on the data to make it machine-readable and comparable at a large scale. 

We then independently carried out manual checks across all 15 constituencies to assess the quality of their data analysis. We found their data analysis to be 90% accurate. And we found a litany of cases that the ECI could have easily detected.

In the Laukaha assembly constituency, 19-year-old Ankit Kumar has been registered to vote twice. His father’s name, Anil Mahto, and even booth number are the same – 371. But he has been registered with two voter identity numbers, ZQQ3191681 and ZQQ3217643. 

Then in Bisfi assembly constituency, there lives 26 year old Anjum Sheikh. She is registered to vote at booth number 91, under EPIC AAY3361391, and her father’s name on the roll is Md Javed Shaikh. She is also registered to vote at booth number 89 of the same assembly constituency, under EPIC AAY3343621. The father's name on the list here is “Mohammed Javed.”

Purified or Dirtier?

Our findings over 15 assembly constituencies raise serious doubts on ECI’s claims that the SIR in Bihar has done a complete purification of electoral rolls. It also calls into question ECI’s claims that it has already removed lakhs of duplicates in the first phase of its exercise. ECI had made this assertion, days after concluding the first phase of the SIR. On July 27, 2025, it claimed that it removed 0.89 percent of the electorate or 7 lakh voters, because they found them to be duplicate entries.

Data analysts who reviewed these voter lists said that many of these duplicates were also present in Bihar’s final voter lists of January 2025. These were prepared after the Bihar election authorities did a special summary revision at the end of 2024. 

The Commission had also issued special instructions for deduplications two years ago. These instructions sent to all States and Union territories clarified that Electoral Registration Officers on the ground could raise their own motions, that is, use their own judgement to initiate the process of removing  duplicate voters or what ECI called “Demographically Similar Entries.” The ERO would also conduct field verification of names it flags before removing them permanently from the list. ECI had released this notification on August 11, 2023, to better clarify and amplify the procedures and the powers local election officers had to clean voter rolls. 

For summary revisions, unlike the SIR for which no detailed guidelines exist in the public domain, ECI mandates its officers to check for duplicates even before it publishes its draft electoral rolls. It outlines it as a prerequisite to seek publication of draft rolls. “Deduplication software is run to throw up probable duplicate entries in the roll, which are verified and removed,” ECI said in a presentation on procedural matters related to roll revision. 

We sent the ECI’s Delhi headquarters and its Bihar Chief Electoral Officer a detailed questionnaire, where we asked if this deduplication software was applied to the Draft SIR roll before publication. We also asked them about the past deduplication exercises in Bihar. We had not received any response from either by the time of publishing this report. 

By now, as part of our ongoing project investigating the SIR in Bihar, we have identified three large-scale errors in the draft rolls that could potentially facilitate fraud. 

Previously, we found 5000 duplicate voters in one assembly constituency in Bihar, Valmikinagar, that were also present in three adjacent constituencies of Uttar Pradesh.

In our follow-up report, we identified 80,000 voters who had been registered at addresses that were either false or dubious. Many of these errors were also present in Bihar’s voter rolls before the special intensive revision as well. 

On August 17, Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar had doubled down on the positive outcomes of the Special Intensive Revision, claiming that only this exercise could achieve “total purification of the electoral rolls.”

Yet our reporting shows over 34,000 cases of certain duplication in merely 15 constituencies. This, even as ECI claims to have the ability to flag possible duplicates, as we have previously shown. And as the Chief Election Commissioner characterised, it conducted a comprehensive exercise to weed out these exact errors. “In a revision of intensive nature, the voter list is purged of all errors since the voter shows up on the electoral list in a new way,” he had claimed during the press conference on August 17. 

And while ECI, which claims to have backend software for deduplication, was unable to weed out duplicates, they also made Bihar’s draft electoral lists non-machine-readable to prevent others from finding such duplicates. 

Errors like dubious house addresses hold relatively less scope for fraud than people with two votes. And, at the scale we have found these errors, in constituencies where candidates win by small margins, the double voters could potentially hold a decisive influence on the outcome. 

The finalised electoral list for Bihar SIR will be out soon. This will lock in who will vote during Bihar’s upcoming assembly elections in November. The period for filing claims and objections for the Bihar SIR ends on September 1. The Supreme Court will soon hear the plea to extend this deadline for filing claims and objections. Our investigation into the Bihar SIR continues.