NEW DELHI: Supreme Court Monday requested Election Payment to answer within every week to TMC MP Dola Sen’s plea accusing the poll panel of arbitrarily deleting bigger than 58 lakh names from West Bengal’s draft voters’ record by refusing to fair receive valid and permissible documents from folk all over the SIR snort. Exhibiting for Sen, senior advocate Kapil Sibal talked about, “What is this happening? EC is sending instructions to various election officers through WhatsApp messages or through video conferencing. This is impermissible as all such instructions must be in writing to ensure transparency in the process of preparation of voters’ list.”
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A bench of CJI Surya Kant and Justice Joymalya Bagchi requested EC counsel Eklavya Dwivedi to answer to Sen’s petition by Saturday, and posted the topic for Jan 19. Sen has sought extension of Jan 15 closing date for submission of claims and objections to draft voters’ record. Calling EC ‘WhatsApp rate” for issuing instructions to election officers through the messaging platform and not through written orders, the MP said EC must be directed to accept permanent residence certificates, panchayat residence certificates and family registers as valid documents for inclusion in voters’ list.
The draft electoral roll for Bengal was published on Dec 16, and 58,20,898 names were deleted, which the Rajya Sabha MP alleged was without any notice or personal hearing. She said there has been a precipitous decline from 7,66,37,529 voters after the Special Summary Revision of 2025 to 7,08,16,616 voters on the draft electoral roll. She said contrary to the SOP for SIR, in several assembly constituencies, deletion decisions with respect to voters categorised as absentee, shifted, dead and duplicate (ASDD) are being processed centrally and marked en masse as ‘Disposed – Form 7’ on the Electoral Registration Officer Net Portal.
“Alarmingly, this looks to be going down without bodily verification, particular particular person listening to or meaningful involvement of the EROs concerned,” she alleged. Sen said, “A majority of affected electors are ladies voters, whose surnames enjoy modified put up-marriage, main to misclassification by algorithm former by EC; over 90% of the conditions are mismatch in names attributable largely to failure of algorithm; minorities are largely tormented by misclassification of algorithm.” As the final roll, scheduled to be published on Feb 14 (after closure of notice and hearing phase on Feb 7), Sen apprehended that the Bengal assembly elections will be immediately declared thereafter, and requested SC to direct EC to correct its voters’ list revision process and attempt to include all eligible voters.
