According to Ministry of Road Transport data, there are roughly 40 crore (400 million) vehicles registered in India across all States and Union Territories. No two vehicles across the country have the exact same registration number. Similarly, there are 20 crore (200 million) people in India with a driver’s licence. No two people have the exact same driver’s licence number. Each number is unique. The same person may have many driving licences (albeit illegal), but each driving licence number is unique.
It is obvious and elementary that every vehicle registration or driving licence number or any ID number is unique, and that two records cannot have the same number. Yet, this simple and basic principle is violated in the voter lists of the Election Commission of India (ECI). Voters in Bengal have the exact same voter identification number as some in Uttar Pradesh; this pattern is one that repeats itself across many States. Nearly two decades earlier, in 2008, the then Chief Election Commissioner boasted that the ECI had given electoral photo identity cards (EPIC) to every voter. Apparently, he did not know that the most elementary rule of any identity system is for the ID number to be unique and not have the same number for many.
Much cause for worry
It gets worse. For example, if you are a registered voter, I can change your registered mobile number to my number using Form-8 without you getting to know it. Then, using my mobile number and OTP for your voter id, I can submit an application to delete you as a voter. It is as simple as that. This is how there was an attempt to delete 6,000 genuine voters in the Aland constituency in Karnataka — which the Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha, Rahul Gandhi, exposed on September 18, 2025.
Five days after Mr. Gandhi’s exposé, the ECI, after vehemently denying his charges, quietly and surreptitiously changed this process to now use only the Aadhaar-linked mobile number. While this is a welcome and positive change, such a significant move to link Aadhaar to voter id was done without any press release or discussion. This is a clear and implicit admission by the ECI of the egregious faults in its voter list management system that has been exploited to manipulate and impact electoral outcomes.
It has also been clearly established, as Mr. Gandhi showed yet again, on November 5, 2025, that India’s voter lists are riddled with duplicate, fake and ghost voters. A lack of unique voter id numbers, and allowing anyone to change voter details are such elementary system errors which even an engineer in his teens with a basic knowledge of databases will not commit. It is evident that the ECI is staggeringly incompetent in its database management abilities. This is cause for worry as the voter list is India’s most important database. It is abundantly clear that India’s voter lists need to be purified and managed better by more competent people and processes.
A Bihar-style SIR is bad
In this context, the idea of a Special Intensive Revision (SIR) to purify voter lists is welcome. There is no doubt that India’s voter lists need to be cleaned up. But can this be entrusted with the same authorities under the very process that muddied it in the first place? The ECI, as seen in press conferences held by the Chief Election Commissioner, has proved that it is blatantly biased and partisan. So, the ECI lacks both the trust and the capabilities to come up with its own processes and rules to conduct an SIR to clean up voter lists. The only alternative is for the ECI to undertake this cleaning up exercise as a joint constructive exercise with the involvement of all political parties in every step, and not just issue diktats and orders.
First, the Bihar-style SIR is not the way to conduct this exercise in other States. The Bihar SIR was malicious in intent, and was rushed with the sole aim of the deletion of genuine voters under the false reason of removing illegal migrants from the list.
Second, the Aadhaar is fundamental and integral to having a clean voter list. There is deliberate conflation and confusion being created by the ECI on the use of Aadhaar, claiming that it is not proof of citizenship and so it cannot be used, which is true. Every Aadhaar holder need not be a voter. But every voter must be an Aadhaar holder. Aadhaar linked de-duplication of a voter list is the most efficient and cheapest method to remove duplicates, fakes and ghosts and ensure that every voter has only one voter id card that is unique and non-transferable. By repeatedly rejecting the Aadhaar and even the need for de-duplication, the ECI is showing itself to be either technically ignorant or willingly malevolent or both.
Third, genuine voters must be enrolled by visiting every household and registering voters using proper documents, and not by asking voters to download forms online or collecting them from a centre and registering themselves on their own. The ECI must go to voters instead of asking voters to go to them, as they did in Bihar. When a State such as Telangana can do a complete census of 3.5 crore people by visiting every household in two months, the ECI must and can do this also. This is the only way to ensure that no genuine voter is left behind. This also implies that the ECI cannot rush this exercise in a month like it did in Bihar. Clean voter lists are too important and fundamental for an SIR to be done in a hurried and shabby way.
Listen to the Opposition
Political parties are integral and a vital cog in the wheel of the SIR process. The ECI is known to be unresponsive to complaints and suggestions from Opposition parties. A striking example was in Maharashtra where, in October 2024, a month before voting, all Opposition parties wrote a joint letter to the ECI with clear evidence of the mass addition of fake voters. But this was completely ignored. We know how 75 lakh new and mysterious votes were cast in the Maharashtra State election. Shockingly, the BJP alliance got exactly 75 lakh more votes in the Assembly election vis-à-vis the Lok Sabha election to win a majority. Had the ECI taken the Opposition’s complaint more seriously, Maharashtra might have had a different Chief Minister.
The all-party meetings that the ECI convenes are a farce where the ECI puts on a show of listening to parties but then issues its own rules and procedures. The SIR process must be one where political parties are consulted at all levels and at every step — from the State leadership in the State capital, to every district, to every booth. These meetings must be video recorded, and suggestions, complaints and ideas given by political parties must be clearly documented.
The most important and strongest demand by the Opposition parties is for the ECI to publish the final, consolidated and machine-readable digital copy of the photo voter rolls after the SIR process. This is an absolutely critical step for the ECI to do for it to win back the trust of the Opposition parties and the public.
It is not that the ECI woke up one day and realised the need for cleaning up voter lists through SIR exercises. After the Congress party exposed clear anomalies in the Maharashtra 2024 State election and, subsequently, in two constituencies in Karnataka, and in Haryana, it became crystal clear that India’s voter lists are being manipulated to impact elections. It is welcome that the ECI acknowledges the serious issues with the nation’s voter lists and wants to rectify. But the cure must not be worse than the disease. The Chief Election Commissioner must understand that a Bihar-style SIR is a bad idea.
Praveen Chakravarty is Chairman, All India Professionals’ Congress and Data Analytics of the Congress party
Published – November 06, 2025 12:08 am IST
