For the first time in the history of India’s flawed yet universally acclaimed democratic process, crores of verified existing voters have been put at risk of systemic disfranchisement—ironically by the very body responsible for guaranteeing free and fair elections. And shockingly by untested software used to further “cleanse” a voter roll which has just been verified already!
When the Special Intensive Revision kicked off in West Bengal on November 1, there were 7.66 crore registered voters. After the house-to-house scrutiny concluded a month later, 58 lakh voters (roughly 7.6%) were deleted—marked as Absent, Shifted, Deceased or Duplicate. A further 32 lakh “unmapped” voters, who could not link either themselves or their parents/grandparents to the 2002 voter roll, were summoned for mandatory hearings.
That left a clean list of 6.75 crore voters who were verified and “mapped”. The Election Commission of India assured them that they needed no further scrutiny: all they had to do was to show up at their booth on polling day with their voter cards and they could vote.
Then came the masterstroke more thunderous than demonetisation. Ground level electoral officers found that, unbeknownst to them, the ERONet portal, for which technically only they had login IDs, had been manipulated via the backend by the ECI to suddenly mark 1.3 crore voters (over 17% of the total) as dubious cases where a Logical Discrepancy (LD) had apparently been detected. This was done using an untested software with an opaque algorithm. No official communication or clarification on the subject has been issued in writing till date.
How was the software used? In multiple layers. First, the hard copies of the 2002 Bengali roll had to be digitised. An algorithm translated the 2002 Bengali voter roll into English and another did the same for the 2025 roll. The catch? The algorithm was based on character recognition and threw up different results in the two rolls which didn’t match in a huge number of cases. Compounding the problem was human error where physical enumeration forms collected during the SIR were uploaded by data entry operators onto the ECI’s database.
The LD cases are categorised into 5 groups, ranging from illogical to plain ridiculous, such as: a voter who is one of more than 6 siblings; who has a mapped parent who is 50 years older; a mismatch in the name of the mapped parent between the 2002 and 2025 rolls.
Let’s take for instance, Shyam Roy, a 60-year-old valid voter registered on both the 2002 roll and the 2025 roll, whose father is listed as “Ashim Roy” in Bengali script in both rolls. The software throws up his father as “Asim Ray” in 2002 and “Osheem Roy” in 2025. Poor Shyam Roy is now marked out under the “name mismatch” category, summoned for a mandatory physical hearing.
Wait, there is also Dilip: he is one of seven descendants mapped to his grandfather. The others being his siblings, parents and cousins. They just wanted to be mapped to someone elderly, and the enumeration form allowed it. He is summoned under the “ancestor mapped to more than 6 persons” category.
Or take Pranab. He was a late child, born in a village home after much prayer and penance. He is summoned under the “age difference with mapped parent >50 yrs” category. The software is not just faulty; it also follows arbitrary instructions (like the 6-child limit) programmed by technocrats with no sense of India’s social reality who essentially turned a voter update into a war on citizens.
Make no mistake: I, a verified Indian citizen registered on the voter roll, risk being deprived of my franchise because the ECI’s faulty software decides it is an electoral crime that my mapped parent sired me after the age of 50!
India’s Constitution was born on January 25, 1950. Article 324 birthed the ECI on the same day, entrusting it with the superintendence, direction and control of the election process. Today, it is presiding over a grotesque circus, where untested software is testing genuine voters and risking mass disfranchisement.
The author is a member of the Lok Sabha.