From 70 FIRs over deletion of voters earlier this year in Andhra Pradesh to allegations about erasure of voters in poll-bound Delhi, electoral rolls seem to have replaced EVMs as a primary opposition concern over the last few months.
This is not a 2024 problem. Last year, the Supreme Court had disposed of a PIL after the Election Commission of India said names can’t be deleted without giving voters prior notice. That was in tune with the EC manual on revision of voter rolls.
But do claims of illegal voter roll revisions hold water? To investigate this, Newslaundry decided to carry out surveys in three Lok Sabha constituencies where victory margins varied from thin to large, selecting booths and assemblies with the largest deletion rates. A deletion rate refers to the percentage of voters that were knocked off any voter list.
Here are some of our findings from Farrukhabad, Meerut and Chandni Chowk:
➨ Over 32,000 voters were struck off the rolls in Uttar Pradesh’s Farrukhabad, where the margin of victory was just 2,678 votes. In our small sample survey, the deletion rates were much higher in areas housing Yadav, Muslim, Shakya and Jatav voters as compared to localities with upper caste voters.
➨ Fake voters thrive in Meerut. Our two-booth survey revealed that 27 percent of existing voters were bogus in the Lok Sabha constituency, where the BJP’s candidate won by just around 10,000 votes. More than 1 lakh voters were added this year. And findings from our field visit cast a shadow on certain patterns in both deletions and additions.
This story was originally published in newslaundry.com. Read the full story here.
