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New Delhi: Firing at the Election Commission over the final electoral roll published after the Special Intensive Revision in Bihar, Congress on Wednesday claimed that at least 10% of total deletions of around 67.3 lakh voters belong to just 15 out of 243 Assembly seats.
It asked the Election Commission why it was not providing a consolidated list of deleted voters and by booth and the reasons for the deletions. Congress also raised suspicion about the inclusion of around 4.6 lakh out of 21.53 lakh new voters in the final list besides claiming that there are around five lakh duplicate voters still in the electoral rolls.
The EC described the allegations as “baseless narratives” while insisting that “zero appeals” have been filed in any of the 243 seats, even eight days after the publication of the final rolls on September 30.
In a statement, Congress’ Empowered Action Group of Leaders and Experts (EAGLE) found fault with the EC for not providing a consolidated voter list while releasing it as 90,000 “separate individual files in image format”. This was despite pleas by the Congress for a machine-readable voter list which makes analysis “very cumbersome”.
“Why is the ECI so hesitant to make voter lists easy to analyse? What is it scared of?” the EAGLE, which has Ajay Maken, Digvijaya Singh, Abhishek Singhvi, Praveen Chakravarty, Pawan Khera, Gurdeep Sappal and Nitin Raut as members, said.
It said the Lok Sabha elections had 7.72 crore registered voters in Bihar and on a net basis, 30 lakh people are no longer voters for the Assembly election next month. The EAGLE wanted EC to tell who are these voters and how many of them voted in Bihar in 2024 polls.
Referring to the addition of 21.53 lakh voters, it said Form 6, which is to register a new voter, is available for only 16.93 lakh and asked, “where are the remaining 4.6 lakh forms? Were these voters added without due process?”
It also claimed that “more than one-tenth of these (67.3 lakh) deletions are in just 15 assembly constituencies”. Bihar had 7.89 crore electors as on June 24, a day before SIR started, and the final list showed 7.42 crore voters. Around 65 lakh voters did not find a space in the draft list and another 3.66 lakh were excluded from the draft list.
The EAGLE asked, “why has the EC not made available the final list of all deleted voters and their details by booth and category?”
It also claimed that its analysis showed that there are more than five lakh duplicates – same name, relative name, age, gender and address – voters in the final list published. “What was the point of SIR if there are still more than five lakh duplicates? How will ECI verify and clean these now?”
Congress demanded that the final electoral roll must be frozen on the last date of nomination, the deadline for receiving applications for inclusion in the voters' list.
“Any supplementary or additional lists published later should not be permitted to alter the voter base. The elections must be held strictly on the list finalized on the last date of nomination,” it said.
The statement said Leader of the Opposition Rahul Gandhi has been consistently pointing out “irregularities” in the voter list and how it has been used to “manipulate” electoral outcomes.
The party welcomes all efforts to clean voter lists and make them transparent and answering the questions will be an important step by the ECI to gaining the confidence of the public about the integrity of voter lists, it added.