India’s Voter Roll Revision Deleted an Estimated 130 Million Names
The deletions came in a revision of voter rolls that began in June last year, and the tally of roughly 130 million names is an estimate. That estimate is by Yogendra Yadav, an elections specialist and a prominent critic of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ruling Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party. Yet the BJP has cited the same figure as authoritative in its defense of the revision, and the rolls once listed 980 million names.
Kanchan says people in her community were deleted on the basis that they had relocated, even though an election official came to visit and, she says, had her sign and hand over a form.
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Kanchan’s accusation — that the government is choosing the people who support it and that the BJP engineered the rolls to disenfranchise communities opposed to it — is a view widely held among critics of the revision, including a former chief election commissioner of India, SY Quraishi.
Intent and mechanism deserve separating, though. Activists helping Indians get back on the rolls say many were deleted for failing to produce information never demanded of voters before, such as proof that parents or grandparents voted more than two decades ago — and impossible paperwork can disenfranchise people whether or not anyone drew up a list of opponents.
The spelling mismatches point the same way: people were told to prove who they were after discrepancies between names on the rolls and names on enumeration forms, and those forms went to some voters but not all, so the new burden landed unevenly.