The Election Commission Has a Lot to Answer For in Bihar’s Voters' List Deletions and Additions

There can’t be any response other than demanding the resignation of the Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) for the way he has released the final voters list for the Bihar assembly polls.

After intense scrutiny and intervention by the Supreme Court for months the Election Commission has produced a final list of voters which is nothing short of outrageous. The fact that the EC can peddle such a voters' list and call it clean and “purified” only tells us that the CEC is now acting with complete impunity and has the support of his masters to brazen it out till the Bihar elections are concluded on November 11.

For starters, the list has suspected duplicate voters numbering 14 lakhs, as per an investigation by Reporters Collective. The investigation also reveals possible fake or imaginary addresses of 1.32 crore voters. This constitutes a very high level of contamination of the voters' list and therefore puts a huge question mark on the integrity of the election process itself. How could the Election Commission call this list clean by any stretch of the imagination?

Just imagine, if 14 lakh duplicate voters are theoretically controlled by one party with a huge workers’ network and commensurate resources, then these votes could be deployed in a targeted way across some 100 constituencies which could lead to an additional 14,000 votes per constituency. This could well be the difference between victory and defeat.

The larger point is that the scale of voter list contamination has reached such gargantuan proportions that the entire election process now stands vitiated. This point was established with documents and other evidence by Rahul Gandhi in Madhavepura assembly constituency in Karnataka where 15% of the votes were duplicates, fakes, and suspicious new voter entries.

The Bihar SIR exercise started with the problem of deletions. The Supreme Court intervened and forced the ECI to be transparent about the identities of the deleted voters and give reasons for their being deleted. The SC also mandated the use of Aadhaar as valid for those seeking to register as fresh voters after being wrongly deleted.

The Election Commission, caught with its pants down, had to prepare a final list while observing all the conditions suggested by the Supreme Court.

But the final list of deletion itself has become a cause of controversy as the ECI is still not being transparent about who all have been deleted and on what basis.

Activist Yogendra Yadav, who had been assisting the Supreme Court, has raised very critical issues called the final voters' list another scam.

Yadav said the Election Commission in an affidavit to the Supreme Court had stated that only 16.93 lakh voters had applied to be freshly registered as voters. But actual numbers ECI has freshly registered in the final list are 21.6 lakh voters. Yadav is asking how did ECI find 3.7 lakh additional voters register? What are the antecedents of these new voters who didn’t figure in EC’s affidavit to the Supreme Court last month.

Yadav is also asking ECI whether the deletion of 3.6 lakh voters in the final list is because of lack of documents or other reasons.

In short, there are questions galore and no answers forthcoming.

The integrity of the voters' list and the election process is in shambles and we are easily entering a phase where no election outcome is likely to have credibility in the eyes of the people.

Some other numbers in the final list of deleted voters are statistical oddities. For instance 33% of the total votes deleted are those of Muslims when they constitute merely 16% of the total voter population.

This raises grave suspicion because the SIR exercise itself began partly with the dog whistle of removing alleged foreigners (read Bangladeshis) who might have illegally registered as voters.

When asked by several journalists how many so-called foreigners have been deleted from the voters’ list, the CEC maintained a studied silence. Finally Yogendra Yadav revealed that there are merely 900 odd “foreigners” in a list of 7.3 crore. This number is nothing short of egg on the CEC’s face. PM Modi flagged the issue of foreigners’ infiltration in a public rally in Purnea, Bihar last month. This bogus campaign was accompanied by the BJP formally applying for the removal of 80,000 voters who happen to be Muslim in a Muslim dominated constituency of Dhaka in Bihar, as unearthed by Reporters Collective in an investigation. They amount to almost 40 percent of voters in the constituency, reflecting the sheer brazenness of the attempt.

There is no doubt that voters' lists across India, as is gradually coming to light, are being manipulated via fake additions and deletions. The grave danger is that technology and other offline resources are being deployed to manipulate the voters' lists on a scale that is threatening the democratic process and denying the people their voting choice. There is an urgent need for an all party meeting to reverse this slide. The opposition has shown unity on the vote chori issue in the last few months. This needs consolidation and civil society as well as the judiciary need to pressure the ruling party to start a bipartisan process to clean up India’s election process.

This piece was first published on The India Cable – a premium newsletter from The Wire – and has been updated and republished here. To subscribe to The India Cable, click here.

As the election process comes under scrutiny, read The Wire's coverage of the Bihar SIR, opposition's allegations and more, here

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