Nitin Sethi
The Election Commission of India has ordered a countrywide intensive revision of electoral roles. Would that be an answer to the large-scale problems alleged by Rahul Gandhi and Congress using data from one constituency? The answer is No. Let us tell you why.
We must remember, maintaining and updating voter-lists across the country is a massive task. Even with the best intentions, ECI and its army of deputed officers are bound to see some errors.
But, ECI has not done any exercise in public domain that assess the level of fault and errors that exist.
It does do an annual internal parametric test of revised voter roll. But this is not discussed in public. My colleague @ayushikar1998 looked at the data for Bihar. And we see huge variations. Some can be explained. Others cannot be. At district and state level. It does do standard tests of electoral rolls every year and the variations are worrisome.
This is the result of the usual voter list revision called SSR done annually along with deletions, additions and changes. But the SIR that the ECI has now launched in Bihar, to put it politely, is very worrisome.
We know this because we have been investigating the Bihar SIR from day one. It was principally flawed. It was botched in its implementation, and it has become a mess worse than the one it claimed to set out to sort.
How was it principally flawed and bad. You can read here.
By confounding voter rights with taking over the role of also confirming citizenship of people, the ECI made it worse. Read here.
By locking a needed exercise of role revision to a created haste (linking the revision to Bihar election), the ECI has unleashed chaos. Previous SSRs took months. The ECI ordered a full overhaul to be done in practically 30 days (the initial period of gathering forms.
By now it's ascertained that more than 60% of enumeration forms have been submitted without the requisite records. ECI allowed this midway to subdue the anger that was rising against its BLOs.
A large number of forms have been filled by BLOs on their own, with support of partisan booth level workers of different parties to overcome the bizarre 30-day period limitation.
Legally now the only option for millions of people in Bihar is to line up at the ERO offices to show their papers if ECI has to follow its own command. In just 30 days. Or, else these forms without attached records will have to be accepted by ECI at face value.
This will mean a mass-scale unchecked revision of the voter-roll. You will see the result of this in coming days. Wrong names, addresses, fake details, duplicates etc.
This chaos gives a chance to unscrupulous actors to delete and add names in specific pockets of their intestest under the cover of the large scale confusion and changes.
At the moment the focus is on the 1 crore plus names that have not made it to the draft list. These numbers might come down somewhat but a few lakh voters added/deleted/changed can make or break seats.
By then the ECI could come out and claim, hey opposition got it wrong, it wasnt 1 crore plus wrong deletions. The change is to a smaller level. But no one would have the time before elections to see if these changes are correct and how any wrongful and purposefully fake one's impact consitutuencies.
Mark this space, you will see this play out in Bihar in the next few weeks if not next few days. Why do we say this, because we have been processing the data for some areas in Bihar and are seeing worrisome patterns.
To end, SIR done across the country the Bihar way is not the solution to the problems Rahul Gandhi and Congress have alleged in the voter lists.
The good thing is, this focus on allegations has at least begun to help citizens claim back the voter list as their property where ECI is only their custodian, and not the owner. The voter lists must be made openly available in a manner they can be analysed.
