The Supreme Court on Monday sought a response from the Election Commission on pleas filed by MPs from the Trinamool Congress alleging procedural irregularities during the special intensive revision of voter rolls in West Bengal, Live Law reported.
The counsel for the poll body sought two weeks to file its response. However, a bench of Chief Justice of India Surya Kant and Justice Joymalya Bagchi granted only a week to the Election Commission.
The matter will be heard next on January 19.
The court was hearing petitions filed by Rajya Sabha MPs Derek O’Brien and Dola Sen.
Appearing for O’Brien, advocate Kapil Sibal alleged before the court that booth-level officers were receiving directions on platforms like WhatsApp instead of through formal means, making it difficult to establish any audit trail of the process.
“The ECI cannot act arbitrarily, capriciously or dehors law, nor can it substitute legally prescribed and set procedures with ad hoc or informal mechanisms,” PTI quoted O’Brien as saying.
In her plea, Sen alleged that orders passed as part of the process were arbitrary and unconstitutional, thereby leading to the deletion of eligible voters, Live Law reported.
The state’s draft electoral rolls were published on December 16. It showed that more than 58 lakh voters were removed after being marked dead, shifted or absent.
The state’s chief electoral officer had at the time announced that an additional 1.36 crore voters would be called for hearings as they were removed from draft rolls due to mismatches or anomalies in voter details, such as spelling variations, inconsistencies in parental or age information, and other data irregularities identified by system-generated algorithms, Live Law reported.
An assistant electoral registration officer who has resigned alleged that these “logical discrepancies” were “due to sporadic errors in the conversion of the PDF of the 2002 Electoral Roll data to CSV [Comma-Separated Values] files”.
“The spelling of the names of 2002 was taken as ‘sacrosanct’,” she had said in her resignation letter. “However, in reality, many names were corrected through Form 8, later in accordance with the rules of ECI. This was the major cause for father name mismatch in cases of progeny mapping.”
West Bengal is expected to head for Assembly elections in the first half of 2026.
Besides West Bengal, the special intensive revision of electoral rolls is underway in 11 other states and Union Territories.
In Bihar, where the revision was completed ahead of the Assembly polls in November, at least 47 lakh voters were excluded from the final electoral roll published on September 30.
Concerns had been raised after the announcement in Bihar that the exercise could remove eligible voters from the roll.
Also read: Single mother, BJP MLA, Marwari trader: The Bengal voters on EC’s SIR radar
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