NEW DELHI: Raising questions over the integrity of the Special Intensive Revision ( SIR) of voter rolls in Bihar, the Congress on Wednesday flagged several concerns including the five lakh duplicate names and deletion of the voter names mostly from 15 assembly constituencies in the final voter list published last week.
EAGLE, the election monitoring cell of the party, in a statement said that a preliminary analysis of the final voter list of Bihar showed that there were 7.72 crore registered voters in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections.
"Which means, on a net basis, 30 lakh people of Bihar who were registered as voters for the Lok Sabha elections are no longer voters for the Vidhan Sabha election..Who are these 30 lakh people?. How many of these people voted in Bihar for the Lok Sabha 2024 election?" it asked.
The party further pointed out that the ECI claims 21.53 lakh voters were added in Bihar; however, Form 6 is available for only 16.93 lakh.
"Where are the remaining 4.6 lakh forms? Were these voters added without due process?" it asked.
The party said that preliminary analysis of the final list shower that a total, of 67.3 lakh voters have been deleted in the SIR exercise. More than one-tenth of these deletions are in just 15 assembly constituencies.
"Why has the EC not made available the final list of all deleted voters and their details by booth and category?" it said.
As per the analysis, there are more than 5 lakh duplicate (same name, relative name, age, gender and address) voters in the final list published, it pointed out. "What was the point of SIR if there are still more than 5 lakh duplicates? How will ECI verify and clean these now?"
The CEC has allowed applications for inclusion up to ten days before the last date of nomination, the final electoral roll must be frozen on that date. 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 finalised on the last date of nomination , said the statement.
The party further added that 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 Congress party welcomes all efforts to clean voter lists and make them transparent. Answering the above questions will be an important step by the ECI to gaining the confidence of the public about the integrity of voter lists."
