Nearly two crore voters in Maharashtra could be left out of the electoral rolls after their forms could not be collected during the house-to-house enumeration exercise under the Special Intensive Revision (SIR), which concluded on Monday evening.
A majority of these voters are reportedly from Pune, Thane and Mumbai. Voters whose forms have not been collected will not feature in the draft electoral rolls scheduled to be published on August 24.
However, the list is only a draft and not the final electoral roll. Voters will have time until September 23 to get their names in the electoral rolls.
During the SIR exercise, BLOs visited households with pre-filled forms, which were then collected for verification and digitisation. If a form remained uncollected, it does not mean that the voter is ineligible. It means that the voter may have moved, shifted residence or was unavailable at the address when the BLO visited.
NCP (SP) legislator Rohit Pawar claimed that there were several problems with the SIR and that nearly 18 million people were yet to be surveyed. He said he would meet the Maharashtra Chief Electoral Officer to raise concerns over voters who may have been left out of the process.
Pawar said that what happened in Bihar could happen in Maharashtra as well. He also raised concerns over the use of Form 6, which is used to include names in the electoral rolls. Pawar alleged that lakhs of voters were added during the 2024 Lok Sabha elections using Form 6 and then these names were deleted.
He further claimed that BLOs were under pressure and that, in some cases, they had not been able to complete even one of the three required visits to voters' homes. He also asked what the urgency was of the exercise when elections are three years away.
Pawar also alleged that the software provided by the BJP was being used by party activists to manipulate electoral rolls.
“Growing interference by the ruling party can be harmful to democracy,” Pawar said.
