E-Paper
AI digitisation of voter rolls led to mismatches: Mamata to CEC
West Bengal CM Mamata Banerjee criticized the digitization of the 2002 voter database, citing AI errors that misclassified many genuine voters.
Digitisation of the 2002 SIR database using AI tools has resulted in large-scale mismatches, with several genuine voters categorised as logical discrepancies, West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee told Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) Rajiv Kumar in a letter on Monday.
“In the absence of any digitised database of the last SIR, the manual voters list of 2002 – including those published in vernacular scripts – was scanned and translated into English using AI tools for digitisation. During this transliteration, serious errors occurred in the electors’ particulars. These errors have resulted in large-scale data mismatches, leading to many genuine voters being categorised as logical discrepancies,” Banerjee wrote in her letter to the CEC on Monday.
The ruling Trinamool Congress had earlier attacked the poll panel over the large number of voters with logical discrepancies in the state. On Saturday, Banerjee had written to the CEC after the poll panel sent a hearing notice to Nobel laureate Amartya Sen. The chief minister had termed it as “a matter of profound shame”.
Banerjee also cited cases of eminent poet Joy Goswami, Tollywood actor and TMC MP Deepak Adhikari, cricketer Mohammed Shami and a monk of Bharat Sevashram Sangha, who have been sent hearing notices.
While around 5.8 million dead, duplicate, absent and shifted voters were found in the draft roll published on December 16, 2025, another 3.2 million voters were found to be unmapped in the state. Initially, the ECI had found around 16.7 million voters who had logical discrepancies in their enumeration forms. The number later dropped to around 9.4 million after scrutiny and removal of minor discrepancies such as errors in spellings.
Logical discrepancies were divided into seven categories - those who have been mapped with more than six persons in the progeny mapping, those whose age difference with their parents is less than 15 years; those at least 45 years of age but whose name was absent in the 2002 list; those who show a mismatch in their father’s names in the 2005 and 2002 lists; those whose age difference with grand-parents is less than 40 years; voters whose age gap with parents is more than 50 years and voters whose sex doesn’t match with the 2002 list.
Last week, the EC exempted voters who are residing abroad from personally appearing during the hearing process of the ongoing SIR. Government employees, defence personnel, private sector employees and students, among others, who are temporarily outside the state for a job, studies and hospitalisation among others, have also been exempted from personally appearing in the hearing.
In another development, Manoj Kumar Agarwal, the Chief Electoral Officer of West Bengal, was contemplating lodging a complaint with the Kolkata Police after his mobile number was made public through some WhatsApp groups. The CEO was being flooded with phone calls and messages, officials aware of the developments said.
