New Delhi: The Opposition Congress accused the Election Commission of India (ECI) of carrying out arbitrary changes to the process of conducting the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) in 12 States and demanded it of full transparency, The Hindu reported.
Alleging targeted deletion of votes in West Bengal and Tamil Nadu, the Congress leader Sasikanth Senthil told a press conference at the party headquarters in Delhi that ECI had made several “U-turns” in its protocols for the SIR.
Expanding on it, Senthi said that ECI discontinued the use of the ‘de-duplication’ software that it had used till 2023 to detect any duplicate voter ID during the SIR exercise in Bihar, with the ECI claiming it was not “foolproof”.
However, he pointed out that ECI reintroduced it now for the ongoing revision in 12 States.
Pointing to figures emerging from the SIR he said over 32 lakh voters were ‘unmapped’ in West Bengal just as ‘logical discrepancies involved more than 1.7 crore entries’, The Hindu reported.
It is reported that around 97 lakh votes were deleted in Tamil Nadu with nearly six lakh removing from Senthil’s constituency of Tiruvallur alone.
Senthil accused the ECI of conducting the process in what he said ‘hit-and-trial manner’ without giving clear instructions to the Booth-Level Officers (BLO) alongside not giving them any training.
Further he pointed out that BLOs were not given instructions on what to do with duplicate votes, leaving it to their discretion.
‘The ECI needs to come out with clear and transparent instructions about the SIR, particularly about the process and yardstick for deleting voters from the electoral rolls,’ Senthil said, adding that BLOs are facing ‘logical discrepancies’ such as age gap between parent and child.
‘The worst hit in this experiment are going to be the poor and marginalised sections of society,’ Senthil added.