West Bengal voter list may shrink by 68 lakh from 2024 Lok Sabha polls; SIR hearings conclude, final list due February 28

KOLKATA: Bengal's voter count is likely to shrink by at least 68 lakh, or about 9%, from what it was in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections. The final list after special intensive revision (SIR) of the electoral rolls is scheduled to be published on Feb 28.

The state's draft SIR list, published on Dec 16, had around 7.1 crore electors after excluding a little over 58 lakh ASD (absent, shifted, dead/duplicate) voters. Election Commission sources said about 10 lakh more names are set to be excluded.





A senior EC official said 1.5 crore voters were identified with logical discrepancies or marked unmapped in the draft list and needed to attend in-person hearings. Of them, 3.6 lakh voters could not be handed over notices because BLOs failed to locate them.

"These 3.6 lakh electors will be excluded from the final roll straightaway. Additionally, about 5.2 lakh voters received the hearing notices but did not appear before EROs/AEROs till 2pm on Saturday. Their names will also be excluded," the EC official said.

At the document-verification stage that followed hearings, another 1.6 lakh names were marked "ineligible". "Therefore, the number of electors will go down by at least 10.4 lakh in the final roll," the official said.

In a meeting with the Bengal chief electoral officer, special roll observers and district magistrates on Friday, the poll panel flagged several cases where newspaper clippings, blank pages or invisible images had been uploaded on to the system and even verified. "Around 15-20 such cases were shown to DMs and central observers through a PowerPoint presentation. All such cases will be scrutinised during the super-checking exercise. Therefore, the number of ineligible electors may go up further," another EC official said.

In the period between the publication of the draft roll on Dec 16 and Jan 19, EC received 7.4 lakh Form 6/6A submissions, both online and offline, from persons seeking enrolment as new voters in Bengal. Also, 42,501 Form 7 submissions were made for deletion of names from the electoral roll due to death or change of address. More than 3.4 lakh Form 8 applications were submitted for update and minor corrections in EPIC. "All these forms will be disposed of before the publication of the final roll," the official said.

According to EC's timetable, documents submitted by voters during hearings have to be scrutinised and verified by Feb 21. Disposal of cases, too, need to be completed by the same date. Rationalisation of polling stations must take place by Feb 25 before the publication of the final roll three days later.