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| Nitin Sethi |
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| Hello, We promised that we will be relentless in our pursuit of seeking accountability from the Election Commission of India (ECI) regarding its electoral roll purification exercise, “Special Intensive Revision”. Our latest investigation reveals 1.88 lakh cases in just39 assembly constituencies where people with the exact same name and relative’s name have been registered twice within the same Bihar assembly constituency. The most alarming are the 16,375 cases where duplicates are spitting replicas of each other. The name of the voter, the relative’s name, and age match completely, while addresses are the same or some kilometres away. ECI has repeatedly claimed that it has released a cleaned-up draft voting list. The Commission claims that it removed more than seven lakh duplicates in Bihar before publishing the draft rolls, but our investigation shows that such dubious voters remain on the draft list on a large scale. The discrepancies exposed in our stories point towards a systemic problem in the SIR process and how it has the potential to impact the electoral process. Read the investigation here: 1.88 lakh cases of dubious double voters in 39 assembly constituencies of Bihar The work done by The Reporters’ Collective and many other independent organisations is repeatedly pointing out fundamental issues in the draft voter list. The Election Commission’s work is increasingly under the scanner, and it is under pressure to address them. The electoral body, however, has not only refused to acknowledge the issues but has also not shared any records of how the decision to conduct SIR was taken. So far, the ECI has refused to reply to our detailed questionnaires but, on August 31, the ECI, through its Bihar’s Chief Electoral Officer, released a statement on our work. Without a hint of irony, ECI says we mined the data to reveal patterns of wrong and potential fraud in its voter database. We agree. We had to do it because the ECI did not. We demolish the ECI’s arguments with this new investigation. And, we will soon put out a full response. We are a small newsroom, and despite our limited resources, we have been trying to cover the issues in the ECI’s SIR exercise for the past several weeks. You can read all of it here, in our Electoral Roll Project. |
After the truth-shower 