The Election Commission of India has begun issuing notices to West Bengal voters — flagging cases where six or more people listed the same ‘parent’ on voter list enumeration forms. Those flagged by the EC software have been called for hearings to establish their eligibility amid the ongoing revision of voter rolls in the state. The initial draft list was published in mid-December last year and omitted the names of 58 lakh voters from the state.
“You have been added as the son/ daughter of someone whom six others have claimed as their father, which creates the suspicion of a possible wrong connection,” Indian Express quoted the notice as saying.
Chief Electoral Officer Manoj Agarwal had earlier said that approximately 1.67 crore voters from the state had been flagged for “logical discrepancies” in their form. The centralised software reportedly tagged 23.64 lakh electors whose father had six or more children as per the form details.
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Summoned for hearings
According to the Indian Express report, the notices asked the elector to attend a hearing at a designated place and time. They were also told to bring documents from a list of 13 outlined by the ECI. This is the first time that such a notice has been generated but it is likely to be adopted in other states where SIR is currently underway.
Nobel laureate Amartya Sen was also served a notice earlier this week for “logical discrepancies” in his form details. The West Bengal CEO said that the age difference between Professor Sen — who is a voter in the Bolpur assembly constituency in Birbhum — and his mother, Amita Sen, was less than 15 years.
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SIR hearings unearth thousands of ‘illegal’ voters
The West Bengal government said on Tuesday that the ongoing revision of voter rolls had so far led to the identification of more than 11,000 ‘illegal’ voters in Nadia district. The area accounts for a majority of such cases while no such electors have been found so far in Bankura or south Kolkata. According to data released by the state government, as many as 9,30,993 voters have completed hearings under the ongoing SIR process to join the digital voter list. Officials told PTI that Electoral Registration Officers had so far identified 11,472 voters whose names would be deleted from the final electoral roll. |
