NEW DELHI: Supreme Court asked Monday Election Commission to respond within a week TMC Plea by MP Dola Sen accusing the poll body of arbitrarily deleting more than 58 lakh names from West Bengal’s draft voter list by refusing to accept valid and admissible documents from people during the SIR exercise. Senior advocate Kapil Sibal, appearing for Sen, said, “What is happening here? EC is sending instructions to various returning officers through WhatsApp messages or video conferencing. This is not permissible as all such instructions must be in writing to ensure transparency in preparing the voters’ list.” A bench of CJI Surya Kant and Justice Joymalya Bagchi asked EU lawyer Eklavya Dwivedi to respond to Sen’s petition by Saturday and posted the matter for January 19. The senator has requested an extension of the January 15 deadline for filing claims and objections to the draft electoral list. The MP referred to the commission as the “WhatsApp Commission” because it issues instructions to returning officers through the messaging platform rather than through written orders. The Commission should be directed to accept permanent residence certificates, panchayat residence certificates and family registers as valid documents for inclusion in the voters’ list. The draft electoral roll for Bengal was released on December 16 and 58,20,898 names were deleted, which the Rajya Sabha MP said was done without any prior notice or personal hearing. She said there was a steep decline from 7,66,37,529 voters after the special revision of 2025 to 7,08,16,616 voters in the draft electoral roll. She said unlike the SOP for SIR, deletion decisions relating to voters categorized as absent, deferred, dead and duplicate voters (ASDD) in several constituencies would be processed centrally and marked en masse as “Discarded – Form 7” on the Electoral Registration Officer Net Portal. “What is worrying is that this appears to be happening without physical verification, individual consultation or meaningful engagement from the affected EROs,” she claimed. Sen said: “A majority of the affected voters are women voters whose surnames changed after marriage, resulting in misclassification by the algorithm used by the EC; over 90% of the cases are mismatched names, largely due to the failure of the algorithm; minorities are largely affected by the misclassification of the algorithm.” When the final list was set to be released on February 14 (after completion of the notice and consultation phase on February 7), Sen assumed that the Bengal assembly elections would be announced immediately thereafter and asked SC to direct EC to correct the revision process of its voters’ list and try to include all eligible voters.
