Patna, Oct 8 (IANS) Congress has raised serious questions about the transparency of the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of the voter list conducted by the Election Commission of India (ECI) ahead of the upcoming Bihar Assembly elections.

In a letter addressed to the Election Commission, the party alleged that despite repeated requests, the ECI has failed to provide a machine-readable version of the updated voter list, making any independent analysis extremely difficult.

The letter stated, “Despite several pleas by the Congress party, the ECI has not made available a machine-readable voter list, which makes any analysis of the voter list very cumbersome. Further, the ECI did not make the voter list available as one consolidated list but released it as 90,000 separate image files. Why is the ECI so hesitant to make voter lists easy to analyse? What is it scared of?”

According to Congress, the final list published by the ECI shows 7.42 crore registered voters in Bihar – about 30 lakh fewer voters than the number recorded during the 2024 Lok Sabha elections.

The party questioned who these voters are and how many of them had cast their votes in the parliamentary polls last year.

The party further claimed that while the ECI reported adding 21.53 lakh new voters, official Form-6 applications were available for only 16.93 lakh, leaving 4.6 lakh additions unexplained.

“Were these voters added without due process?” the Congress asked, adding that 67.3 lakh names were deleted during the revision exercise, with over 10% of these deletions concentrated in just 15 assembly constituencies.

The party also alleged that more than five lakh duplicate voters remain in the final rolls despite the extensive revision process.

“What was the point of the SIR if there are still more than 5 lakh duplicates? How will the ECI verify and clean these now?” the letter questioned.

Congress demanded that the ECI immediately release a final list of all deleted voters with booth – and category-wise details and ensure that elections are conducted strictly on the rolls finalised on the last date of nomination.

The letter reiterated Rahul Gandhi’s earlier allegations about irregularities in electoral rolls and their potential misuse to manipulate outcomes.

“The Congress party welcomes all efforts to clean voter lists and make them transparent. Answering these questions will be an important step by the ECI to regain public confidence in the integrity of the electoral process,” the letter concluded.

–IANS

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