NEW DELHI: Supreme Court Monday asked Election Commission to respond within a week to TMC MP Dola Sen’s plea accusing the poll panel of arbitrarily deleting more than 58 lakh names from West Bengal’s draft voters’ list by refusing to accept valid and permissible documents from people during the SIR exercise. Appearing for Sen, senior advocate Kapil Sibal said, “What is this happening? EC is sending instructions to various election officers through WhatsApp messages or through video conferencing. This is impermissible as all such instructions must be in writing to ensure transparency in the process of preparation of voters’ list.” A bench of CJI Surya Kant and Justice Joymalya Bagchi asked EC counsel Eklavya Dwivedi to respond to Sen’s petition by Saturday, and posted the matter for Jan 19. Sen has sought extension of Jan 15 deadline for submission of claims and objections to draft voters’ list. Calling EC ‘WhatsApp commission” for issuing instructions to election officers through the messaging platform and not through written orders, the MP said EC must be directed to accept permanent residence certificates, panchayat residence certificates and family registers as valid documents for inclusion in voters’ list. The draft electoral roll for Bengal was published on Dec 16, and 58,20,898 names were deleted, which the Rajya Sabha MP alleged was without any notice or personal hearing. She said there has been a precipitous decline from 7,66,37,529 voters after the Special Summary Revision of 2025 to 7,08,16,616 voters on the draft electoral roll. She said contrary to the SOP for SIR, in several assembly constituencies, deletion decisions with respect to voters categorized as absentee, shifted, dead and duplicate (ASDD) are being processed centrally and marked en masse as ‘Disposed – Form 7’ on the Electoral Registration Officer Net Portal. ” Alarmingly, this appears to be occurring without physical verification, individual hearing or meaningful involvement of the EROs concerned,” she alleged. Sen said, “A majority of affected electors are women voters, whose surnames have changed post-marriage, leading to misclassification by algorithm used by EC; over 90% of the cases are mismatch in names attributable largely to failure of algorithm; minorities are largely affected by misclassification of algorithm.” As the final roll, scheduled to be published on Feb 14 (after closure of notice and hearing phase on Feb 7), Sen apprehended that the Bengal assembly elections will be declared immediately thereafter, and requested SC to direct EC to correct its voters’ list revision process and attempt to include all eligible voters.
