From 70 FIRs over deletion of voters earlier this year in Andhra Pradesh to allegations about erasure of voters in poll-bound Delhi, electoral rolls seem to have replaced EVMs as a primary opposition concern over the last few months.
This is not a 2024 problem. Last year, the Supreme Court had disposed of a PIL after the Election Commission of India said names can’t be deleted without giving voters prior notice. That was in tune with the EC manual on revision of voter rolls.
But do claims of illegal voter roll revisions hold water? To investigate this, Newslaundry decided to carry out surveys in three Lok Sabha constituencies where victory margins varied from thin to large, selecting booths and assemblies with the largest deletion rates. A deletion rate refers to the percentage of voters that were knocked off any voter list.
Here are some of our findings from Farrukhabad, Meerut and Chandni Chowk:
➨ Over 32,000 voters were struck off the rolls in Uttar Pradesh’s Farrukhabad, where the margin of victory was just 2,678 votes. In our small sample survey, the deletion rates were much higher in areas housing Yadav, Muslim, Shakya and Jatav voters as compared to localities with upper caste voters.
➨ Fake voters thrive in Meerut. Our two-booth survey revealed that 27 percent of existing voters were bogus in the Lok Sabha constituency, where the BJP’s candidate won by just around 10,000 votes. More than 1 lakh voters were added this year. And findings from our field visit cast a shadow on certain patterns in both deletions and additions.
➨ In Chandni Chowk, Model Town, populated by Punjabi and upper caste voters, saw a deletion percentage three times lower than assembly segments housing Muslim and backward voters. Among the three booths with the biggest cuts was one in the Congress candidate’s neighbourhood.
➨ The overall indication from our surveys is that areas with a higher share of voters from religious and caste groups who were less likely to vote for the BJP saw disproportionate deletions. Additionally, the inclusion of new voters needs further and comprehensive scrutiny to identify bogus voters.
Many of the revisions were in violation of the EC’s manual on voter rolls which makes personal verifications by the Electoral Registration Officer mandatory in cases of a deletion percentage larger than 2. Even when the Electoral Registration Officer under Rule 21A of the Registration of Electors Rules, 1960 has the power to delete names of dead persons or of those who have shifted their residence suo motu.
In Delhi’s Chandni Chowk, a significant percent of the deleted voters claimed they had not even been sent a notice about the deletion.
In Farrukhabad, over 15 percent of those deleted raised the same allegation. If the same trends were to apply to the entire Lok Sabha seat, wrongful deletions would be nearly double of the BJP’s victory margin.
In Meerut, we also found odd turnout trends. For example, a booth with a high percentage of bogus voters saw the turnout rise from 1.6 percent in the 2017 assembly elections to 43 percent in the 2022 polls.
When Newslaundry shared the data of disproportionate deletions with the Election Commission, an EC official said, “We do not maintain any data with regard to caste or religion in the electoral rolls. No database is being maintained by us based on people from which religion or caste dominate any constituency. We only designate SC constituencies.”
A comparison of deletion percentages in the three Lok Sabha seats and their assemblies we surveyed.
What the norms say
Updation of voter lists is a continuous process for which the poll body has detailed guidelines.
The EC usually begins the revision process in August and publishes the final roll in January. It first spends a month carrying out house-to-house verification of voters by the BLOs. It spends another month preparing the first draft of the voter roll, removing discrepancies, re-arranging booths, etc. The first draft is usually published in late October followed by a special summary revision. During this period, it gives 30 to 45 days to the public and political parties to raise objections and carries out awareness campaigns. Parallelly, the district administration scrutinises all the claims and disposes of them by late December, or as per the deadline that’s announced. The rolls are published in January.
However, in a general or state election year, these rolls are further revised, with the nomination deadline of election candidates as the cut-off date. The final rolls are published subsequently.
For all the exercises regarding preparation, updation and revision of electoral rolls, the state government, especially district officers, have a huge role to play within the electoral machinery, with a Sub Divisional Officer-rank bureaucrat taking charge of the updation process as the Electoral Registration Officer, assisted by teams of assistant EROs, supervisors, and booth-level officers (BLOs). The field verifications are carried out by BLOs, usually lower rung government or semigovernment employees, such as anganwadi workers, panchayat secretaries or primary school teachers.
All the deletions are done through Form 7, including those that see suo motu action by the electoral machinery. For both general and suo motu deletions, notices are mandatory in most cases, especially when the deletion percentage is higher than 2. If the rate of deletion at any booth exceeds 2 percent, the EC mandates the ERO to personally cross verify the instance.
There are usually three cases to strike off a voter’s name – if the voter has died, has changed their address, or has a duplicate entry in the rolls.
If a voter is dead, the booth-level officer (BLO) conducts a ground verification or collects their death certificate. In the case of shifting, the ERO has to send a notice to the voter’s residence, giving him 15 days to respond. If the postal department returns the notice mentioning that the person was not found at the address given, or if the elector does not respond within the stipulated time, then the ERO shall send a BLO for field verification. Only then can the ERO delete a voter. In the third instance of a duplicate entry, a field verification by the BLO is required.
There is a system in place to cross-check all the applications as they are processed. A portion of the work done by BLOs is inspected by supervisors, and a share of what the supervisors check is reviewed by the AERO, and so on. EROs take the final call. And in an election year, the EC has to guard against suo motu deletions.
Ashok Lavasa, former Election Commissioner of India, points out that during these revisions, the commission is usually conservative about deletions even if the voter has shifted their house because the purpose is that no voter should be denied the right to vote.
SY Quraishi, former Election Commissioner of India, feels that the “scope of manipulation of electoral rolls has always been there and the EC is aware of it”.
“I have always been saying that electoral rolls are the EC’s soft underbelly. This is why it spends crores of rupees every year advertising in multiple languages in newspapers, that please check your roll. Because if you find any discrepancy or error in your electoral roll then corrective measures are possible before it is too late. But 99 percent of people do not check it,” Quraishi said.
The methodology
Newslaundry selected three constituencies on the basis of three varying victory margins of the BJP in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections.
First, where the victory margin for the party was less than 0.5 percent of the vote share. There were 19 such Lok Sabha seats, out of which the BJP won in eight. We selected Farrukhabad.
Second, where the victory margin was between 0.5 to 1 percent of the vote share. There were only two such constituencies, Balurghat and Meerut, and the BJP won both. We randomly selected Meerut.
The third constituency was where the BJP won with a considerably big vote share, higher than at least three percent. In that category, we chose Chandni Chowk.
In Farrukhabad, the BJP’s Mukesh Rajput won by a slim margin of 2,768 votes. In Meerut, Arun Govil defeated SP’s Sunita Verma by 10,585 votes. And in Chandni Chowk, BJP’s Praveen Khandelwal won by over 90,000 votes.
We then examined the final voter list in over 5,495 polling booths across these three Lok Sabha constituencies, and narrowed down on the assembly segment where the deletion rate was the highest. In each of the assemblies, we then selected booths where the deletion percentage was significantly high. We then went to over 4,000 houses in all these areas.
The EC official denied allegations of wrongful deletions at all these booths. “Due verification processes have been followed for all deletions.”
Quraishi said, “Their caste and religious composition shows that obviously additions and deletions are being done at a pretty large scale for political considerations. This is not acceptable. It is the job of the district administration, firstly the DM, then the CEO of the state and Election Commission itself to address the laxity.”
On the district administration’s role in the lack of verification in booths which had a deletion rate higher than 2 percent, Lavasa said, “The Election Commission looks at how many votes were added and deleted with respect to the population in an entire state. But it does not do any booth-wise analysis. It depends on the EROs to do all this analysis. So there is one possibility that the commission in its reporting should make columns for such booths where the deletion rate has been unusually high.”
Opposition absent at booths?
The EC also encourages political parties to keep a check on electoral rolls. It facilitates them to depute their booth level agents who can submit forms for addition or deletion of voters. But in clusters with large populations, their role becomes crucial. SP chief Akhilesh Yadav recently said that if the BJP has to be challenged, the fight must be at the booth level.
Data on booth level agents procured by Newslaundry shows that the BJP is the only political party with a consistent presence of agents across constituencies.
The BJP has been performing better than the Congress in closely contested seats since 2014.
For example, in the Chandni Chowk assembly segment, out of the 129 booths, the BJP has agents on 89 of them, while the AAP and Congress have zero. In Meerut district, there are 2,758 booths. The BJP has agents on 1,271 of them while the SP, Congress and BSP have none. Farrukhabad’s Aliganj is the only assembly where the opposition parties have a better score. Out of the 395 booths, SP has agents on all of them, while the BJP has representatives on 360, BSP on 45, and the Congress on just 35 booths.
When we asked EC if it looks into why certain political parties are not appointing agents, the EC official said, “We have created mechanisms to make sure that the whole process is participatory involving all the political parties. We ask political parties to appoint their agents for polling day also. But if any party does not do that then we can not ask them why they are not doing so.”
Several officials in the district administration across the three Lok Sabha seats claimed that the BJP actively raises objections over deletion of voters in both election and non-election years.
SN Meena, AERO in Chandni Chowk assembly, claimed, “Until 2024 Lok Sabha polls, Congress and AAP did not even have a single representative for the entire assembly. It was only the BJP’s agents who would come to meet us every week.”
Ved Pal Singh, assistant district election officer in Meerut, told us, “Every year, we ask the district presidents of all parties to depute their Booth Level Agents. But it is only the BJP who takes it seriously. So they have more scope to increase their voters.”
In Aliganj, where the BJP and SP have equal number of booth representatives, its ERO Jagmohan Gupta said, “That’s why both the parties are competing neck and neck on each booth. SP is highly active flagging their concerns.”
Subhash Shakya, SP’s head of booths in Aliganj, told us, “After the 2022 UP assembly elections, when we saw our voters being struck off the list, we of course corrected ourselves and got active to ensure that this does not happen again.”
Sasikant Senthil, Congress MP and chairman of its national war room, said, “The point of law is to do the due inquiry. It is wrong of the Election Commission to say that it is for the political parties to raise objections at the booth level. Yes, they also have a role but there is a senior level officer in-charge who has to do the due inquiry. They just have to go to the house and verify. But they are doing bulk deletions without due inquiry.”
Newslaundry also reached out to AAP’s political affairs committee member and Delhi chief minister Atishi Marlena several times, but she was unavailable for a comment.
Newslaundry reached out to the EC’s office in Delhi, CEO Uttar Pradesh, and CEO Delhi. We also sought an appointment with Rajiv Kumar, Chief Election Commissioner, to share our findings. This report will be updated if a response is received.
Research by Lionel Muzeyi, Fatima Shabih and Sunil Yadav.
Coming next: In Farrukhabad, signs of targeted deletions, election officials met ‘late at night’ after BJP MLA’s letter.
Subscribe to Newslaundry to read the subsequent installments of this series.
Newslaundry is a reader-supported, ad-free, independent news outlet based out of New Delhi. Support their journalism, here.