The Mysterious 16.18 Lakh Voters Added to Uttar Pradesh’s Roll
Uttar Pradesh is six months away from its assembly elections, so it is time to pull back the curtain on last year’s shadowy special intensive revision, and what it did to the state’s voter rolls.
News reports in January revealed that incongruous to the party line in Delhi, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leaders in Uttar Pradesh were extremely worried months into the SIR. The exercise had initially deleted many of the BJP’s own voters in the state. Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath and UP BJP President Pankaj Chaudhary instructed party cadres to re-enroll them en masse through form 6 .
When we studied UP’s disclosures for the time, we found a startling omission. State election officials ‘forgot’ to disclose data for 16.18 lakh Form 6 requests for voter addition filed during SIR.
In its own manual, the Election Commission of India specifies that officers in each assembly constituency must publish all Form 6 requests filed during the revision process on their state website.
It initially appeared that election officials in UP had followed these instructions to the letter. But when we scraped these disclosures, we discovered that the ECI had omitted revealing lakhs of inclusion requests. Authorities published details for only 80 percent of the applications.The existence of these missing applications was only acknowledged in passing by the UP Chief Election Commissioner on Twitter.
Our analysis reveals that the Election Commission approved 96.27 percent of these Form 6 applications. Yet, because state authorities withheld data for 16.18 lakh of these requests, questions remain about whether these voters were legitimate.
Who are these missing voters?
You can read our story here: The Mysterious 16.18 Lakh Voters Added to Uttar Pradesh’s Roll
The Reporters’ Collective’s Electoral Roll Project has been live for over a year, producing more than 30 investigative reports exposing this exercise in unchecked authority. We are not stopping yet, but our tiny team of reporters relies on your support to sustain this work. Please support us.
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Anjali Bhardwaj: The Special Intensive Revision Decision the Election Commission Says It Never Made
