SOURCE :- SIASAT NEWS
New Delhi: An independent analysis of Uttar Pradesh’s updated electoral roll has uncovered a major transparency failure, revealing that the application data for 16.18 lakh voters is missing from the state’s public portal.
Although the Election Commission of India received 88 lakh new Form 6 applications during the Special Intensive Revision (SIR), the state Chief Electoral Officer’s (CEO’s) website hosts records for only 71.38 lakh, an investigative report by The Reporters’ Collective showed.
The report published on Tuesday, October 6, said it discovered this breach of law “while analysing the voter roll revision in India’s most populous state where assembly elections are imminent”.
Getting to final number
Explaining the process, they said they first reviewed how many had applied to be added back, and then they compared this against how many had been added to the final roll. “We found an inexplicable result.”
Collating all this data with tech support, they found that the ECI had put up details of 71.38 lakh applications from people for inclusion in the voter list, most of them being those deleted from the draft list. However, the ECI went on to add 84.3 lakh voters into the final list.
That’s an extra 12.92 lakh voters right there.
The report pointed out how this is impossible: “The number of people added to the voter list cannot exceed those who applied to be included.”
To understand how this could have occurred, they reviewed every SIR-related data release and press statement on the UP CEO’s website. There, they found a March 7 press note saying that 16.18 lakh voters had applied to be put on a list even before the draft list was drawn up.
Interestingly, one gets to know if they’ve been included, removed, or declared missing only after the draft list is drawn up. “But the ECI said 16.18 lakh voters had applied through Form 6 before this draft was made public.”
At this stage, only the recent adults can apply. But under the law, their details are to be made public, which hasn’t been done. So it is impossible to determine who these new voters are, which assembly seat they belong to, or even if they were actually verified.
The Reporters’ Collective said they spoke to UP CEO Navdeep Rinwa about these 16.18 lakh voters, but he responded with, “We don’t offer consultancy services to resolve your doubts or queries.”
They failed to locate these details on the UP CEO website.
Their questions to both Rinwa and the ECI in Delhi also allegedly did not elicit a response.
UP case different from other states?
The report pointed at another anomaly. “The only way the numbers add up from each stage of SIR in Uttar Pradesh to the final voter list is when one assumes 96.27 per cent of people who were deleted and applied to be put back on the final list, and those who turned of voting ages and applied, were legitimate voters, and the SIR had wrongly removed them in the first place,” it said.
The numbers also appear difficult to reconcile with data from other states. A senior ECI official told The Collective that Form 6 approval rates have generally remained in the 60-70 per cent range during revision exercises. Yet in West Bengal, where the SIR was carried out concurrently with Uttar Pradesh, only about 18.5 per cent of such applications were accepted over the same period.
What UP SIR numbers show
Uttar Pradesh had 15.44 crore voters before the SIR began in October 2025. When the draft list was published on January 6 this year, 2.89 crore voters were purged, marked as absent, shifted, dead or duplicate.
That’s nearly 18.7 per cent of the electorate from the draft roll. While media reported how the CM and other senior BJP leaders urged booth-level party workers to add at least 200 voters to each booth, CEO Rinwa admitted that a substantial chunk of Form 6 requests were from voters wrongfully purged from the voter rolls.
“Those who have been removed from the draft rolls are the ones filling Form 6,” Rinwa reportedly said a day after UP recorded its highest number of Form 6 requests filed in a single day.
The report pointed out how each Form 6 application is “to be verified first by a field inspection by the booth level officer and then approved by the ERO”. Its approval rate is a modest 60-70 per cent on account of party workers filing requests of inclusion.
It said experts helped them scrape the 71.38 lakh applications for inclusion that the CEO made public for the 403 assemblies. It found that across all assembly constituencies, Form 6 requests filed before January 6 were missing.
The 16 lakh-odd applications cited above also came to light when the reporters went through the UP CEO’s X account even as their details remain a mystery, it said.
Can these numbers impact polls?
UP’s post-SIR electorate stands at 13.39 crore; so comparatively speaking, the additional 16 lakh is a small number. “But depending on how these numbers are spread across constituencies, they can have a significant effect in assembly constituencies or at specific polling booths,” said the report.
On asking CEO Rinwa, he said he had “shared the figures about the number of voters deleted in the press conference, and when we asked him that it is not clear, he said, ‘There is no mismatch in our data. The mismatch is in your interpretation.’”
However, The Reporters’ Collective couldn’t find details of these 16.18 lakh voters anywhere.
SOURCE : SIASAT
