Records reveal: A detailed review and updation of the Bihar state electoral roll was completed by January 2025. The roll was found to be robust. Officials were updating the roll well into June. Suddenly, the Election Commission of India called it faulty and junked it, ordering an unprecedented exercise to verify voters from scratch. Chaos has ensued.
New Delhi: On June 11 2024, Tabrej Alam from Meghua village in East Champaran district of Bihar, submitted a form to the designated booth-level officer to delete Hussain Sheikh’s name from the electoral roll. Hussain had passed away. By November, election officials verified Tabrej’s identity and his claim. By January 2025, Hussain’s name was deleted on Tabrej’s request from the voter list of Bihar.
Five months later, the same 37-year-old Tabrej was forced by the Election Commission of India to prove with documentary evidence that he exists, is a citizen of India and resides regularly enough in his village to have the right to vote in the upcoming Bihar assembly elections.
There are millions of citizens in Bihar like Tabrej who may have voted in one or all of the last five general elections and five assembly elections, but now have to present documentary evidence rather quickly to validate their right to vote. And, if they are unable to, they could stand as people of doubtful citizenship in the eyes of the law.
This is the consequence of a sudden decision of the Election Commission of India on June 24 to completely revamp the electoral rolls in Bihar, ordering what it defines as a Special Intensive Revision.
The decision invalidates millions of voters registered since 2003 unless they can prove their citizenship, identity and normal place of residence afresh, and do so very soon. All of them now have to provide evidence afresh of their right to vote. Many who enrolled before 2003 will also have to show proof of their enrolment.
The Reporters’ Collective reviewed records to find that the ECI’s decision was a sudden U-turn that hit the state election machinery by shock. We found evidence that, till days before the ECI’s order on June 24, officials in the state had been regularly updating the electoral rolls using legally mandated and practised methods.
In fact, between June 2024 and January 2025, the state election machinery had completed a revision of the electoral rolls, called the Special Summary Revision 2025, shows electronic records maintained by the Bihar Chief Electoral Officer. This runs contrary to the ECI’s allusions that Bihar’s existing electoral database was in such a bad shape that it needed a full revamp.
The evidence we reviewed shows that contrary to ECI’s claims, even in the month of June 2025, days before the decision, ECI and its officials in Bihar had accepted the existing electoral roll finalised for the Parliamentary elections in 2024 to be valid. It was using this electoral roll to undertake the regular updation, deletion and addition of voters to it, we found.
We spoke to officials in the Bihar Election Commission office and to two people who have served in the Election Commission of India officially at the highest levels in recent years. Alongside, we spoke to more than a dozen Booth Level Officers in Bihar who are the last-mile government officials in charge of elections and electoral rolls. They all wished to remain anonymous. We are citing portions of their testimonies that we could independently corroborate.
One of the two ex-ECI officers we spoke to said it was the first time that the ECI had undertaken such a “disruptive” exercise, which, without reason, discriminates between voters who were enrolled before 2003 and those after.
“If the ECI is asking all voters registered after 2003 to validate their voting rights with a restrictive list of documentary evidence, ECI is suggesting that a disturbing number of people who voted in the past five Parliamentary elections and the past five state elections (since 2003) were either fraudulent or wrongful. Is that so?” he said….
https://www.reporters-collective.in/trc/bihar-electoral-roll-investigation
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Nobel Peace Laureate: ‘We journalists are the defence line between dictatorship and war’ (2021)
‘We can’t remain silent’: journalists refuse to give up despite Taliban terror
After the truth-shower 