Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar addresses the media along with Election Commissioners at the National Media Centre in New Delhi on August 17, 2025.
| Photo Credit: Sushil Kumar Verma
Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) Gyanesh Kumar on Sunday (August 17, 2025) said the list of around 65 lakh names deleted from the draft electoral rolls of Bihar following the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) had been posted on websites of district magistrates “within 56 hours” of the Supreme Court’s order even as he asserted that the SIR had become necessary due to the many complaints received from political parties over discrepancies in voter rolls over the last 20 years.
In a press conference on a day when the Opposition INDIA bloc began the 16-day “Vote Adhikar Yatra” rally from Bihar, the CEC said the list of deleted voters was also “searchable” by Electoral Photo Identity Card (EPIC) numbers as mandated by the Supreme Court.
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The apex court had, while hearing a bunch of petitions challenging the SIR last week, asked the poll body to publish details of 65 lakh names deleted from the voter list with reasons of non-inclusion in a searchable format.
The CEC though, maintained on Sunday (August 17, 2025) that there was a difference between a machine-readable voter list and a searchable voter list. “You can search the voter list available on the Election Commission website by entering the EPIC number. You can also download it. This is not called machine-readable”.
He said that in 2019, the Supreme Court also studied this subject in depth and found that giving a machine-readable electoral roll could violate the privacy of the voter.
Opposition parties have been seeking machine-readable voter rolls from the EC.
Mr. Kumar asserted that at the ground level in Bihar, all the voters, district presidents of political parties and Booth Level Officers (BLOs) were working transparently, validating and giving video testimonials.
“It is a worrying matter that these efforts are not reaching their national and State-level leaders, or they are ignoring it to create confusion. The truth is, all the stakeholders are walking in tandem to make the SIR successful; they are working hard,” the CEC said, urging all political parties to point out the mistakes in the Bihar draft electoral rolls before September 1, the last date for filing claims and objections as per the SIR order.
The CEC did not directly reply to questions of how many foreign nationals, including Bangladeshis, were found during house-to-house enumeration in the Bihar SIR and how many people had till now submitted the required list of 11 documents as proof of their dates and places of birth.
He said: “Intensive probe will be conducted of enumeration forms and if it is found some people are not Indian citizens then they will not be part of the electoral rolls”.
Asked whether the Commission had omitted Arunachal Pradesh and Maharashtra during the intensive revision exercise in 2004 but was doing it in Bihar in an election year, Mr. Kumar said the Representation of the People Act mandated updating electoral rolls before every election. “The EC’s mantra is to include all eligible voters and remove all ineligible voters from electoral rolls”.
Multiple voter cards
He admitted that there could be errors in voter lists and knowingly or unknowingly some people ended up having multiple voter cards due to migration and other issues, he said, and the SIR would rectify it.
Mr. Kumar said there was a difference between one name appearing in the voting list many times and the person actually voting more than once.
“Names can be wrong in electoral Lists, but this is not the same as wrong voting. One person can vote only once. If you mix the two and say that votes are being stolen, then it is wrong”.
Published – August 17, 2025 03:37 pm IST