Over the past seven months, the Election Commission of India (ECI) stepped up efforts to delete or rectify over 10 million duplicate entries from the electoral record, according to the concerned officials.
Voter identity cards have been rectified by removing items with comparable demographic or visual characteristics. ECI has made eliminating duplicate entries a top priority as it works to build a complete digital voter database.
To make the procedure simpler, ECI enabled the optional linkage of Aadhaar with voter identity cards as of August 1. The opposition criticised the action, claiming it would enable voter demographic mapping and created privacy concerns.
The officials said 1,191,191 demographically similar entries were identified and 927,853 of them were eliminated. ‘DSE [demographically similar entries] computation is carried out by CEOs [chief electoral officers] of respective states…,’ said an official, requesting anonymity.
Then, verifications are carried out at the booth level. The official stated that ECI does not suo motu delete any entries.
9,800,412 comparable photographic entries were removed when ECI found 31,889,422. ‘The computation of PSE [photographically similar entries] was done in two stages. Prior to the draft’s publication in 2022, PSE for five states that conduct elections was calculated in the first phase. The PSE for the remaining 32 states were calculated in the second phase,’ the official added.
Over 31 million voters were counted in total over both rounds (3.18 crores), and 98,00,412 voters were eliminated. Additionally, some 20 lakhs [two million] corrections were processed.
According to a second official, the voluntary Aadhaar linking will speed up election roll repairs. There are currently nearly 940 million voters registered in the country.
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