Bengal Voter Purge: Why 14 Lakh Deletions Exceed Election Commission Estimates

Initially, when digitisation of the filled-in enumeration forms collected by booth-level officers (BLOs) began, the Election Commission estimated that about 10 lakh names would be removed from the voters’ list.

However, by Tuesday evening, the digitisation trend showed that 14 lakh voters had already been detected for deletion.

An official in the Chief Electoral Officer’s office said the work is still in progress, as many forms remain to be collected and digitised.

“The process of digitisation of the enumeration forms already collected is still on. Many enumeration forms are yet to be collected from the voters, following which they would also be digitised. So by all means, the final number of deleted voters would exceed the initial estimate of 10 lakh on this count,” said a source in the West Bengal CEO’s office.

He said the situation will be clearer once the draft voters’ list is released on December 9. The commission had fixed November 30 as the deadline for completing digitisation and had instructed each BLO to upload at least 150 filled-in forms a day through the BLO App.

The source further said that the deletions would cover the dead, duplicate entries where a voter’s name appeared in two places, those who had shifted permanently to another state, and voters who were missing or could not be traced.

The total number of electors in West Bengal as on October 27 is 7,66,37,529, indicating that as many as 2,25,546 enumeration forms are yet to be distributed.

The SIR started on November 4, and the entire exercise is expected to be completed by the end of March next year.

Meanwhile, West Bengal Governor C.V. Ananda Bose issued a firm remark on the protest by a section of BLOs over the SIR workload outside the Chief Electoral Officer’s office.

“These are issues that the administration will have to take care of. If there is any failure on their part, I will certainly intervene,” the Governor said.

src/snj/skp

- IANS