Where did 790k voters go? Congress questions Maharashtra chief electoral officer amid SIR row

The party said the state had 9.86 crore electors on May 26 but 9.78 crore before the June 30 SIR, seeking a probe into the difference.

The Congress is questioning an alleged discrepancy of 790,364 voters in figures released by the state chief electoral officer (CEO) during the ongoing Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of the electoral rolls in Maharashtra.

BLOs removed names of deceased and duplicate voters during the pre-SIR exercise, according to the CEO’s office. (Praful Gangurde/HT Photo)

The political party claims the voters were deleted from the rolls between May and August this year.

Congress flags voter count difference before SIR

Maharashtra Congress general secretary Sandesh Kondvilkar, in a letter to the CEO, said that figures shared with political parties on May 26, revealed that Maharashtra had 98,644,413 voters, whereas the CEO’s August 31 media release said the state had 97,854,049 voters before the SIR started on June 30. The difference is 790,364 electors. This means 790,364 voters were deleted from the rolls during this period. There was no special summary revision drive during this period. How were so many voters deleted in such a short span,” he asked.

Kondvilkar questioned whether these voters figured in the ASDDO (Absent, Shifted, Dead, Duplicate, Other) lists or the draft electoral roll. He demanded a high-level inquiry into the discrepancy and sought clarification from the election authorities.

Deceased and duplicate entries removed, officials say

An official from the CEO’s office, however, claimed the difference was part of a process undertaken ahead of the SIR, to minimise duplication of names. “It was part of the pre-SIR process in which BLOs deleted the names of people who had died, as well as entries identified through photo similarity or duplicate entries at multiple polling booths. Lists of such deletions from the electoral rolls were published every month on the websites of the CEO and the ECI. The claim is unfortunate as we had taken political parties into confidence,” the official said.

He confirmed that these deletions were not part of the ASDDO list. During the SIR, the Election Commission removed 20.7 million electors in the ASDDO category and identified another 12.2 million voters with anomalies in their details or whose records could not be mapped with their 2004 SIR records.