​Augean mess, Pg8

Key Highlights:

• The Election Commission of India (ECI) is conducting a Special Intensive Revision (SIR) to clean electoral rolls across 12 states.
• The Supreme Court directed the ECI to ease the verification process for electors in West Bengal due to flawed notices.
• Anomalies in Bihar showed more women electors were deleted than men during a similar revision process.
• In Tamil Nadu, the number of deleted electors plus 2024 voters exceeds the original number of electors in some booths.

Detailed Insights:

• The ECI's "cleaning" process uses the 2002 list for mapping, leading to errors and flawed notices for genuine electors.
• The insistence by ECI on using Form 6 for re-registration prevents auditing the number of wrongly removed genuine electors.
• The State Election Commission in Uttar Pradesh found discrepancies where the rural electorate count exceeded the ECI's total count.
• The Supreme Court's intervention highlights concerns that the process threatens universal adult franchise.
• Analyses in Bihar, Tamil Nadu, and West Bengal revealed anomalies in deleted electors' lists, meriting further investigation.
• The deduplication process has resulted in the complete deletion of electors' names in several instances.

Key Concepts Involved:

• Electoral Roll: List of persons registered to vote in an election.
• Universal Adult Franchise: The right of all adult citizens to vote, regardless of wealth, income, gender, race, ethnicity, belief, etc.
• Deduplication: The process of removing duplicate entries from a list or database.