Ninety-one per cent deletions in Delhi are based on officers not being able to find someone. Every removal carries one of four reasons — absent, shifted, dead or duplicate (ASDD). Two reasons dominate in Delhi: ‘permanently shifted’ accounts for 31.6 lakh (or nearly two of three) deletions while ‘untraceable or absent’ accounts for another 11.7 lakh (or one in four). Together, these two reasons account for 91 per cent of deletions in Delhi. ‘Death’ accounts for less than 6 per cent and ‘duplicate’ registrations less than 3 per cent.
Five constituencies in Bengaluru have lost more than half of their electors while nine of Hyderabad’s 15 constituencies have seen more than 40 per cent deleted. Sabar Institute, a Kolkata-based public policy research non-profit, found that in two constituencies in Hyderabad, the number of deletions is higher than the number of votes cast in the last election.
If there are mistakes in the list, the ECI argues, voters can appeal and get their names restored. Not exactly a cinch, as horror stories of voters running from pillar to post — before and after elections — have demonstrated.
In an RTI reply to Congress MP Isha Khan Chowdhury from Malda (West Bengal), the ECI has claimed that only 7 lakh of the 27 lakh voters declared ‘not eligible’ — after they were mapped, produced documents and attended hearings — actually approached an appellate tribunal. (West Bengal is the only state that even has these appellate tribunals — 19 of them, set up on a Supreme Court order after the final list in West Bengal saw 27 lakh voters still out of the voter lists. In other states, appeals have to be directed to local election officials.)
The RTI reply, dated 17 August, revealed that of the 38,10,620 (38.1 lakh) appeals filed in the state, only 82,782 (2.17 per cent) had been disposed of by 7 August. At that speed, clearing the backlog would take more than 20 years!
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