The Election Commission’s finding that 11 assembly constituencies of West Bengal have over 25,000 voter cards that share identical identification numbers has strengthened the allegations of the opposition parties that keep raising the issue of “bogus voters” in the state’s electoral roll.
The discovery of multiple voter cards with identical numbers raised concerns in the Election Commission as it came days after the office of the state chief electoral officer released the draft voter list on November 11 with 7.4 crore voter names, where some 16 lakh names were corrected or deleted.
According to sources, there were two Assembly seats – Bongaon Dakshin (North 24-Parganas), bordering Bangladesh, and Matigara-Naxalbari near Panitanki (Darjeeling) on the Nepal border – where most voter cards with identical identification numbers were traced.
“We have asked the districts’ administration to physically verify all cards and remove duplicates from the electoral roll… We are probing if it is a human error or a result of a malicious scheme to pass off foreigners as Indians,” said a commission official.
Artificial intelligence is being used by the EC to identify and address multiple voter cards with similar names (with slight spelling variations) categorized as demographic-similar entries, or with near-identical photos, categorized as photo-similar entries, for a clean electoral roll after corrections or deletions.
An EC official said the concern lay with voter cards with cloned identification numbers.
“Identification numbers are unique and auto-generated. The chance of the same number in two or more cards is slim,” he was quoted as saying.
Commission officials did not rule out multiple voter cards with identical numbers in the rest of the Assembly seats.
“We can only trace and eliminate them once the compilation process is complete,” said an official.
BJP leader Suvendu Adhikari had raised the issue with chief electoral officer Aariz Aftab, alleging around 16 lakh fake or duplicate voters in the state.
Meanwhile, the final voter list will be published on January 5, 2025.
BJP has been constantly flagging the issue of fabricated voter cards, changing demographic composition in the state, and incumbent TMC governments being hand in glove with Islamists to give ‘voting rights’ to illegal aliens including Bangladeshi and Rohingya Muslims to build them as its own core voter base and short-sighted gains. Ironically, when TMC was in the opposition, Mamata Banerjee too had often raised the issue of illegal aliens flooding the state and the left government giving them red carpet treatment.
When she was in the opposition, TMC Supremo Mamata Banerjee had said in Lok Sabha that “infiltration into Bengal has become a disaster” and Bangladesh nationals were on the voting list. However, after coming to power, she is not only being accused of taking Left’s playbook to a new high but also of making provocative remarks and speeches to flog Muslim voters in her corner and give controversial remarks invoking Islamic terminology like Kafirs to cast Parliamentary laws in bad light be it the CAA, NRC.