1/ Our investigation into the revision of Bihar electoral roll (SIR) continues. To keep you up to date on what we have unearthed so far. A quick summary thread by one of the colleagues on the investigating team @gayatrisupbro A thread 🧵
2/ Why it matters: voter rolls decide who votes. If rolls are dirty, elections aren’t free or fair. We know, the voter rolls have always carried some errors and been susceptible to fraud in the past. The annual updating process has long been prone to manipulation and mistakes.
3/ But, this time a belligerent @ECISVEEP undertook a hasty and opaque revision of the country’s entire voter roll, beginning with Bihar. The rules were being written on the fly. So, we began to track it: from courtrooms to the ground, big data to fine details. Here’s what we’ve
4/ A small request. Such deep-dive investigations require time & resources. If you value it, please support us. Our investigation into the SIR is ongoing with reporters on ground, data analysts and fact checkers at work. 👉 Please consider donating. https://www.reporters-collecti...
5/ We first revealed how the SIR had been ordered ignoring a recently completed voter roll update. ECI's orders set arbitrary standards for ~8 crore Bihar voters to provide documentary evidences of citizenship, place of stay and right to vote. https://www.reporters-collecti...
6/ When the ECI blocked scrutiny of the draft SIR voter list, with help of data analysts, we broke the padlocks. We found in Valmikinagar constituency 5,000+ voters had been given Voter IDs in both, UP and Bihar. That is blatantly illegal. https://www.reporters-collecti...
7/ Our analysis flagged hundreds of perfect clones + thousands more with tiny spelling tweaks being given voter IDs in two states. Why is this incredible? Because the SIR wasn’t meant to miss duplicates. It was sold as the big clean-up. Instead, it baked them in.
8/ We found other large-scale errors and potential fraud cooked into the draft list. In Pipra, Bagaha, Motihari constituencies, we found 80,000+ voters clubbed into fake and wrong addresses. In just one non-existent house of Galimpur we found 509 voters. https://www.reporters-collecti...
9/ Whole caste-divided villages suddenly “living under one roof” on paper. Villagers were stunned. “How can Musahar & Brahmins live under one roof? We each have our own houses.” But on ECI’s list, they’re all bundled together.
10/ This happened because the thirty-day sprint to revise electoral rolls did not prioritise cleaning addresses on electoral rolls. Booth level officers were not briefed on notional numbering of households in neighbourhoods which do not have clear addresses, we found.
11/ By Aug 30, we widened the lens. In 15 assembly constituencies, we found 67,826 cases of dubious duplicates holding two Voter IDs within the same constituencies. In 34,392 cases both Voter IDs matched for all details, except addresses. Potential fraud. https://www.reporters-collecti...
12/ Example: Anjali Kumari, 20, Triveniganj. Two IDs. Same relative, same address, same booth. She can literally vote twice at the same polling station. ECI claimed to have removed 7 lakh duplicates already. Yet our investigation showed tens of thousands still there.
13/ Then on Sep 1, We upped the data analysis and scanned 39 constituencies. Found 1.88 lakh cases of dubious duplication. We sharpened our search further to find perfect clones. https://www.reporters-collecti...
14/ Of these, 25,862 people have two voter IDs that are perfect clones. In 1.02 lakh cases the age differs on the two Voter Ids by just 0–5 yrs. These aren’t coincidences.
15/ ECI’s “FactCheck” tried to wave this off as data mining. Said names/ages often match in Bihar villages. Said duplicates are just draft-stage quirks. Didn’t deny 67,826 lakh duplicates. Didn’t explain ghost houses with 500 voters.
16/ They said, "...all stakeholders can inform the Electoral Registration Officer, file their objections, and necessary action can be taken."
17/ While their technological ability to detect duplicates far surpasses ours (we’re a tiny team of journalists on a shoestring budget, while they spend hundreds of crores every year), they expected voters with two IDs to come forward and file complaints themselves.
18/ So here’s the picture: SIR promised “purification.” What we found: duplicates across states, ghost households, double votes in same booth. ECI made the rolls non-machine-readable to prevent such analysis. Transparency blocked, accountability dodged.
19/ In November Bihar votes. The elections are merely weeks away. Voter rolls still have duplicates en masse. Without clean lists, you can’t have clean elections. A dirty voter roll means a fall in the trust built over decades in our electoral democracy.
20/ Our investigation continues to reveal troubling patterns. Just yesterday, we uncovered fresh and significant evidence of flaws in the SIR. We are carefully validating this evidence and will share more soon. Watch this space.
21/ For two months a dedicated team of journalists at the Collective: @ayushikar1998 @Vishnun30 @harshithamanwan & I (@gayatrisupbro) have kept at the investigation with editorial supervision by @journomayank & @nit_set.
@ayushikar1998 @Vishnun30 @harshithamanwan @gayatrisupbro @journomayank @nit_set 22/ We are not done yet. There is more to uncover. ECI promised a 'purified' voter list; our investigations are an attempt at holding it accountable to citizens. We will keep at it patiently & rigorously. Support our work: https://www.reporters-collecti...