E-Paper
Bengal voter revision hit by software errors, EC officials accept
Senior officials from the IT division of the election commission said the SIR of electoral rolls in West Bengal hit by technical problems in the software
Some of the problems in the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls in West Bengal highlighted by the state’s chief minister Mamata Banerjee in the Supreme Court on Wednesday have their roots in the Electoral Registration Officer Network (ERONET) used by the Election Commission of India, senior officials from the IT division of the poll body said.
The problem is two-fold, added the officials, who asked not to be named: the physical clarity of the old records; and the translation of the 2002 and 2004 records from Bengali to English.
“The system depends heavily on how clear the old records are. If the scanned copies are unclear or faded, the chances of mistakes increase,” one of the officials said.
Other officials said that the software first reads old paper voter lists written in Bengali and converts them into text in English before comparing names and family details with present-day voter records. “If the old and new spellings do not match closely enough, the system automatically flags that particular voter for further checking,” a second official said. This is what the ECI internally calls a “logical discrepancy.” As a result, common spelling differences were flagged, the officials said, providing instances: a Mohammed becoming a Muhammad; Sheikh being read as Shekh in the software; and Mondal appearing as Mandal.
“The software does not understand local language habits or name variations. It simply compares spellings and marks differences,” the official mentioned above said.
HT reached out to EC for a reaction, but could not get an immediate response.
On Wednesday, Mamata told the Supreme Court of India that the SIR process was generating large numbers of “logical discrepancies” due to software issues, leading to genuine voters being flagged. The court asked ECI to clarify the basis for such flags and ensure eligible voters were not excluded.
On Thursday, the ECI wrote to the WB government citing non-cooperation in the SIR exercise and sought an explanation on compliance with its directions, stressing the need for coordination to complete the revision.
The officials acknowledged that a heavy dependence on the software reduced the role of Booth Level Officers (BLOs) and Electoral Registration Officers (EROs), who usually correct such spelling or language-related issues during field checks. “Earlier, these small errors could be fixed immediately on the ground. Now, once the system flags a voter, the correction process becomes longer,” the official said. Cyber security expert Srinivas Kodali said such outcomes are to be expected. “When a system only compares text and does not understand language or context, it ends up treating small differences as serious issues,” he said.
ERO Net, developed by the National Informatics Centre and rolled out across the country in 2013-14, was originally designed to bring voter registration, correction and deletion onto a single digital platform. Officials said that while the core system has existed for over a decade, new checks linked to the SIR were added only last year by ECI, increasing scrutiny of voter details and leading to a sharp rise in entries being marked with “logical discrepancies”.
The officials said the problem was made worse because changes to the software were carried out while the SIR exercise was already underway, without stopping field work or issuing clear written instructions. “The software kept getting updated, but the work on the ground could not stop,” the official said.
