The weekend following polling day in Telangana, parties were already offering and rejecting alliances; exit polls largely predicting a sweep for the incumbent Telangana Rashtra Samithi, some leaning towards a hung verdict. But what none of the political leaders were talking about was the apparent large-scale deletion of voters from the electoral rolls.
According to activists, at least 8 percent, or 22 lakhs, of the 2.8 crore voters in the state missed out on exercising their franchise due to a faulty voter deletion exercise way back in 2015. On Twitter and other social media platforms, users expressed their discontent with #WhereisMyVote, led by Olympic badminton player, Jwala Gutta.
On 7 December, reports poured in, especially from Hyderabad, of voters who arrived at their respective polling stations to ultimately not find their names on the voters’ list. Bhanu Murthy from Nampally said while he got his voting slip, his wife, who has her Electoral Photo ID Card, was unable to vote. They had tried earlier at another polling booth nearby before returning home disappointed.
“Two anganwadi workers came home and had given the original Electoral Photo ID Card for my wife and a voting slip for me. First, we had gone to Tulsi school, where we were told to come here. Here I have a vote, but my wife doesn’t. We don’t understand why we have to go to so many places to cast our votes. Why is this government doing this?,” said Murthy
In Pitlam village from the same district, an enraged voter said, “I have all the documents necessary to vote. Why don’t I get my right to vote? Am I dead? I demand my right.” In March 2015, the Election Commission of India undertook the National Electoral Roll Purification and Authentication Programme (NERPAP) that would link Aadhaar with Electoral Photo ID Cards to identify and delete bogus and duplicate voters. The algorithm used had a failure rate as high as 93 percent, as revealed during the pilot phase in Bihar the same year.
Within five months, the Supreme Court had ordered that Aadhaar can’t be used for anything other than the Public Distribution System (PDS). But by then, 31 crore IDs were already linked; the Telangana State Election Commission had deleted 27 lakh voters from the rolls already, according to a report by The News Minute, disproportionately affecting voters in the constituencies under Greater Hyderabad. Reportedly, 98 percent of the NERPAP was completed in Telangana and Andhra Pradesh. Over 12 lakh new voters were added to the electoral rolls this time, but it is not clear how many of them are first-time voters and how many are those who reapplied after their names had been deleted.
The same report also says the follow-up to deletion was not done as per ECI norms, which state that when an Electoral Registration Officer intends to delete a voter, there must be “a reasonable opportunity to the voter who is being deleted by sending notices to the voter along with form-6, a document meant to reapply for a voter ID”.
