Apex court asks Election Commission to fix errors in final Bihar voter list

The Supreme Court on Thursday, 16 October, expressed hope that the Election Commission of India (ECI) would act responsibly and address typographical and factual discrepancies in Bihar’s final electoral roll, which was prepared following the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) exercise.

A bench comprising justices Surya Kant and Joymalya Bagchi said the court would take up for hearing on 4 November the legal issues surrounding the Bihar voter list revision.

During the proceedings, the poll panel informed the court that since the publication of the final electoral roll on 30 September, no voter has filed an appeal challenging the deletion of their name.

However, advocate Prashant Bhushan, representing the NGO Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR), disputed the Commission’s claim. He asserted that details provided by a voter whose name was allegedly excluded—dismissed earlier by the ECI as “fake”—were in fact authentic. Bhushan urged the Commission to disclose the number of deletions and the reasons behind them, stressing that transparency was essential to preserve public confidence in the revision process.

The bench observed that the electoral roll will be frozen on 17 October in constituencies going to polls in the first phase, and on 20 October for those voting in the second phase.

Earlier, on 7 October, the top court had directed the ECI to submit details of 3.66 lakh voters who featured in the draft list but were missing from the final roll, noting “confusion” surrounding the figures.

The ECI’s data, released on 30 September, revealed that Bihar’s final voter count stood at 7.42 crore, down by nearly 47 lakh from the 7.89 crore electors listed before the SIR began. However, the number had risen by 17.87 lakh from the 7.24 crore voters named in the draft roll issued on 1 August, which had seen 65 lakh names deleted due to death, migration, or duplication.

The revision exercise also added 21.53 lakh new voters, even as 3.66 lakh names were subsequently removed, leading to a net gain of 17.87 lakh electors.

Bihar will go to the polls in two phases — 121 Assembly constituencies on November 6, and the remaining 122 on 11 November. The counting of votes will take place on 14 November.

With PTI inputs