West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee on Monday wrote another letter to Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar, drawing the poll panel’s attention to “serious procedural lapses” in the special intensive revision of electoral rolls in the state, The Telegraph reported.
The chief minister accused the Election Commission of harassing voters and endangering democratic rights through the voter roll revision process.
The state’s draft electoral rolls were published on December 16. They showed that more than 58 lakh voters were removed after being marked dead, shifted or absent.
The deletion from the draft roll is provisional and citizens can object to their names being removed from the list. Citizens whose names have been dropped from the list can file their claims and objections.
In her letter on Monday, Banerjee said that during the claim hearings, voters were submitting documents to support their claim of eligibility, but were often getting no clear acknowledgment or receipt, The Telegraph reported.
She said that no acknowledgment being issued was depriving voters proof of having made the submission and was placing them “at the mercy of internal record-keeping deficiencies”.
Subsequently, at the verification stage, “these documents are reported as ‘not found’ or ‘not available on record’, and on that basis, names of electors are being deleted”, she said in the letter.
Banerjee said that using artificial intelligence tools for digitising the 2002 electoral rolls had led to errors in voter details. This had led to several genuine voters being categorised as “logical discrepancies”, The Indian Express reported.
She accused the poll panel of disregarding its own statutory processes that had been followed after 2002.
“Why should the process revert to 2002?” she asked. “Does this imply that all revisions carried out over the intervening years were illegal?”
Banerjee said that several discrepancies had been minor, such as “Kr” and “Kumar”, “Shaik” and “Sk” or a person’s age, and should be resolved without calling voters for hearings, The Telegraph reported.
This was her fifth letter to the chief election commissioner since November.
West Bengal is expected to head for Assembly elections in the three to four months.
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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