West Bengal: Seven-step SOP for BLOs to remove deceased, duplicate and fake voters

The chief electoral officer (CEO) of West Bengal has drawn up a seven-step standard operating procedure (SOP) for booth level officers (BLOs) and officials engaged in the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) to weed out dead, duplicate and fake voters in the electoral roll.

A senior poll panel official said that strict guidelines have been sent to the district election officers (DEO) to ensure that BLOs and other officials utilise the extra week in hand to reverify data entries and thoroughly check upon five specific categories of entries.

“An additional week is now available for rechecking the data. All BLOs must utilise this time to reverify the entries made by them. BLOs being verifying authority will be held accountable for lapses which are deliberate in nature,” the official said, quoting a letter sent by the CEO to district election officers on Monday.

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“The BLOs have also been told that backlogs in digitisation of enumeration forms won’t be acceptable,” the official said.

The SOP says that at least five specific categories of entries should be thoroughly checked.

This includes self-mapping voters whose age was 60 years and above in 2002, voters who are 50 years and above but their names were not there in the 2002 list, voters with mismatch in parents’ names, cases where vote gap between the voter and his parents are either more than 45 or less than 18 and cases where a family member has signed on the voter’s behalf as he was absent.

“Officials have been directed to thoroughly check polling booths which were marked as sensitive in the 2021 and 2024 elections, booths with more than 50% progeny mapping and those with less than 20 uncollectable forms,”

Even though the DEOs had sent a list to the CEO on Monday suggesting that there were 2,208 polling stations across the state where the BLOs couldn’t find any dead, duplicate and untraceable voters, the number dropped to 480 after the poll panel tightened the rules.

“Test checks on the accuracy of rolls should be done by the observers, EROs, Assistant Electoral Registration Officers (AERO), BLO supervisors and BLOs,” the letter sent by the CEO states.

There were more than 7,800 such booths where the number of dead, fake, duplicate and untraceable voters was 10 and less.

“The highest number of such polling booths were found in South 24 Parganas (760), Purulia (228), Murshidabad (226), Malda (216) and Nadia (130),” said a second official.

There are at least 80,681 booths across 294 assembly seats in the state. The state assembly elections are due in 2026.

The total number of dead voters found till Tuesday stood at 22,45,861.