CHENNAI: Thirty-year-old Pavithra’s* name appeared twice consecutively on the electoral roll of a polling booth in Coimbatore’s Kavundampalayam constituency — with the same age, father’s name, gender and address.
The periodic de-duplication exercise of the Election Commission of India (ECI) ought to have deleted the duplicate entry — or Demographically Similar Entries (DSE) as the ECI calls them — but did not. The deletion appears to have finally been done during the enumeration phase of ongoing Special Intensive Revision (SIR), albeit in a bewildering manner. First, both entries have been deleted. Second, neither has been deleted for being a duplicate. Instead, the reason marked for one deletion is “not residing (absent)” and the another, bizarrely, is “deceased”.
The case of Lakshmi* (19) in a booth in Salem (North) constituency is similar. Her name, with the exact same details, appeared three times consecutively on the rolls released after Special Summary Revision (SSR) in January 2025. In the SIR draft rolls, all three entries have been deleted — one marked as “shifted”, another as “not residing” and the third as “duplicate”. TNIE searched for these two women with their name, age, relative’s name and gender on the ECI’s portal but was unable to find them, indicating that the system may not only have deleted them for the wrong reasons, but also from everywhere.
TNIE found at least 728 groups of such consecutively-appearing duplicates that have been deleted for different reasons; one reason was “deceased” in 110 groups.
Such mindboggling occurrences highlight the inefficiency of ECI’s software systems and processes on three fronts. It reveals a failure to correctly identify the reason for deletion as duplicates during the ongoing SIR, an inability to check or ensure that only the duplicates are deleted so that one entry of an eligible voter remains on the electoral rolls and a failure to proactively identify and delete such DSEs during periodic revisions.
Although the removal of redundant entries to have a cleaner roll is a key objective of the SIR, only a paltry 3.98 lakh or 4% of entries out of 97.4 lakh deletions in Tamil Nadu were removed for being “duplicates”.
The figure is worse in urban areas where one would expect more duplicates. Of the 39.91 lakh entries deleted from urban constituencies, only 97,360 (2.4%) were marked as duplicates. Similarly, of the 36,129 booths that had 100 or more deletions, 7,722 did not identify a single duplicate.
While under-reporting of duplicates as a reason in the deletions list could be overlooked, what is more concerning is the possibility that several persons with duplicate entries might have got deleted completely from the rolls.
For instance, the deletions list released after SIR had 75 pairs (150 entries) of duplicate entries with same EPIC IDs, which ought not to have got into the system in the first place as EPIC IDs are supposed to be unique. They were cross-constituency duplicates with names, age, relative’s name and gender being the same and just minor variations in how the names were spelt. Of these 150 entries, only two were deleted for being a duplicate. TNIE searched all the 75 EPIC IDs on ECI’s portal and found that none are present in the draft SIR rolls, suggesting they have been dropped completely from the draft rolls.
By querying the deletions list of over 97.4 lakh, TNIE found 1.8 lakh groups of cross-constituency DSEs deleted, of which only 273 were marked as duplicates. It also found 11,400 groups within same constituencies but in different booths, of which only 46 were deleted with the reason given as “duplicates” and around 4,200 DSE groups within same booths, of which 925 were marked as duplicates. At least two Electoral Registration Officers that TNIE spoke to said de-duplication exercises are carried out annually. At that time, potential duplicates are shared with EROs and later verified in the field by Booth Level Officers.
They said that while DSEs within constituencies are managed relatively better, cross-district or cross-constituency DSEs are difficult to handle due to the amount of coordination required at the level of senior officers. The election commission’s manual on electoral rolls published in 2023 allows suo-motu deletion of every entry except the latest one in cases of DSEs, only if they occur within the same constituency (coming under the same ERO) and if all six details of name, relative’s name, relation type, age, gender, and address match.
When asked about specific cases in which all entries related to a person within the same booth seem to have been deleted during the SIR, one of the EROs said that most of the processing of deletions happened within the BLO mobile application with limited or no time for oversight, which could have caused such problems.
(*Name changed to protect identities)
(With inputs from Praveena S A and Seyamla L)