4,271 in one house: Mahoba in Uttar Pradesh the latest ‘voter list wonder’

A massive oddity — ostensibly due to a clerical lapse — in Mahoba district has triggered outrage after it emerged that thousands of voters were clubbed under a single residential addresses during the revision of rolls for the 2026 panchayat elections. The incident has raised serious concerns about the credibility of electoral records and the accountability of officials tasked with safeguarding democracy.

In Jaitpur gram panchayat, the draft voter list showed 4,271 voters registered at house no. 803 — accounting for nearly one-fourth of the village’s electorate. The error was discovered when booth-level officers went door-to-door for verification and found that three entire wards of genuine voters had been lumped into one property on paper, because of inconsistent rural house numbering.

Assistant district election officer R.P. Vishwakarma admitted the anomaly, saying, “The voters are genuine. Only the addresses were wrongly clubbed. We are correcting the irregularities.”

Vishwakarma blamed flawed data entry and ambiguous rural property records. But opposition and social activists are questioning whether such glaring mistakes can be dismissed as clerical slips.

In nearby Panwari town, 243 individuals were shown at house number 996 and another 185 at house number 997 in Ward 13. Locals said houses with just five or six members suddenly appeared to host hundreds of voters.

“This is not a mere error. It reflects casualness and lack of accountability in maintaining rolls. When one house has voters from every caste and community, it destroys faith in the system,” said social activist Chaudhary Ravindra Kumar.

The revelations have fuelled fears of voter manipulation. “If addresses can be mismanaged to this extent, who can guarantee that votes will not be misused?” asked a Panwari resident, pointing to the risk of proxy voting or bogus entries.

The Samajwadi Party (SP) has accused the ruling BJP of turning a blind eye to irregularities that could potentially benefit them in elections. “When one house shows thousands of voters, it is not a mistake but a failure of governance. The BJP wants to tamper with democracy at the grassroots,” said SP spokesperson Rajeev Rai.

The Congress too has demanded accountability from the Election Commission. “If this can happen in Mahoba, what guarantee is there that rolls in other districts are accurate? Free and fair elections cannot happen with such shoddy preparation,” said Congress leader Aradhana Mishra.

District officials insist there is no deliberate wrongdoing and blame outdated record-keeping and data migration lapses during digitisation. They have now ordered re-mapping of addresses by breaking down house numbers into sub-categories.

The issue comes on the heels of an audit last year that flagged more than 1 lakh suspect entries in Mahoba’s voter rolls, including thousands of duplicates across Jaitpur, Panwari, Kabrai and Charkhari.

The ongoing campaign has deployed 486 booth-level officers and 49 supervisors across 273 gram panchayats to clean up the lists before the December deadline for draft rolls.

Analysts warn that the incident exposes a deeper malaise. “Electoral integrity does not collapse overnight. It is weakened slowly through administrative negligence. If such errors go unchecked, they open the door for manipulation,” said political analyst Manoj Bhadra.

Another analyst, R.N. Bajpayee, added, “For a democracy, faulty rolls are like termites. They may appear clerical, but their damage is long-term and corrosive.”

As Mahoba reels from the revelations, the spotlight is now on the Election Commission and district administration to prove that these irregularities are not signs of a deeper rot.

For now, for many villagers and external observers, the episode has become a reminder that a democracy is only as strong as the integrity of its electoral rolls.