10 lakh duplicate names deleted from electoral rolls in Bihar

The deletion of duplicate electors has been done after field verification by booth level officers(BLOs) over the past few months to make the electoral rolls free from discrepancies and check electoral malpractices, officials said.

The state election department of Bihar has deleted 9,82,708 duplicate electors out of 4,64,7702 photo similar entries identified by a software run by the department to identify duplicate voters, according to officials familiar with the exercise.

In Rohtas, 17,753 duplicate names were deleted from the rolls of the district where as in Patna, 12,053 duplicate entries were struck off, sources said. (ANI)

The deletion of duplicate electors has been done after field verification by booth level officers(BLOs) over the past few months to make the electoral rolls free from discrepancies and check electoral malpractices, officials said.

A duplicate entry means name of particular voter appearing in electoral rolls of two or more assembly constituencies.

“The drive was conducted in a comprehensive manner by checking the names and also through field verification by the BLOs,”said an official in the department.

Sources said some of the districts where high number of duplicate voters were deleted include Rohtas, Patna, Gaya, Bhojpur and Jamui.

In Rohtas, 17,753 duplicate names were deleted from the rolls of the district where as in Patna, 12,053 duplicate entries were struck off.

In Gaya, 11,259 duplicate names were deleted, followed by Bhojpur (10,679) and Jamui (10,397).

Officials said the drive was launched by the state election department on the directions of the Election Commission of India( ECI) early this year with the objective of sanitising the electoral rolls.

In last many assembly and parliamentary polls, similar exercises have been conducted to identify duplicate entries.

The biggest such exercise by ECI was in the run-up to November 2005 assembly polls, when the then special advisor to the central poll panel, K J Rao, had zealously monitored the exercise of identifying fake/duplicate names from the rolls. Around 10 lakh fictitious names were deleted during the drive, officials recalled.

In 2013, election officials had detected around 76 lakh “suspect” voters during screening of electoral rolls, majority of which were later detected as duplicate entries.

The total number of voters in Bihar, as per updated electoral rolls as on 15.02.2022, stand at 7.49 crore, of which 3.93 crore are male voters and 3.55 crore are female voters.

Bihar’s chief electoral officer (CEO) H R Srinivasa declined to comment on the latest exercise.