By Gitika Sharma
The Election Commission of India (ECI) is giving new directions for its Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of the electoral rolls that are in progress with their ongoing examination of personal reports by certain specific West Bengal voters that have been designated as “unmapped.”
The move comes in line with complaints and intense political debate in the poll-bound state over the revision of the electoral rolls and efforts to put a stop to such issues due to the presence of such a ‘technical error’ in the voter data that currently remains on the electoral rolls.
Under the SIR exercise, voters must identify themselves or a close relative back to the 2002 electoral rolls, the last complete update was made, so that they don’t lose relevance on the updated list. But a draft state roll published on 16 December showed that more than 58 lakh names had been deleted as deceased, shifted, or untraceable. Over 31 lakh electors were additionally reported as “unmapped,” which motivated the EC to produce hearing notices for them on 27 December, for them to demonstrate their eligibility.
And state electoral officials later found that when they reviewed those rolls, they found many of these supposedly “unmapped” voters and their kin are in the authenticated hard-copy version of the 2002 files, but could not be digitally linked because the old PDF files were not fully converted into CSV (plain text) format. This data hole meant the Booth Level Officer (BLO) app wouldn’t return good lineage links, which resulted in erroneous system flags.
The West Bengal Chief Electoral Officer’s office, therefore, instructed that notices generated automatically for such matters should not be served and should instead be held at the local Electoral Registration Officer (ERO) or Assistant ERO. The vote of such electors with hard copy verifications will keep their registries without having a personal hearing to go through a personal appearance.
‘It also permits field verification through BLO photo-taking of electors and photographing the electors for system records,’ Mr. Lippmann said of the new rule. But the pause does not impact situations when local officers themselves identified voters as unmapped on the streets after conducting site-level inspection.
Political leaders have reacted to the move. Members of the Trinamool Congress have called for support for affected voters, while fears were raised that elderly and vulnerable populations would experience long lines and the unkind circumstances found at earlier hearing centres.
The clarification by the EC aims to balance the technological challenges with legal procedure and voter rights in West Bengal as it prepares for other elections, and it is done so while preserving the integrity of the election roll revision process.