Shift of residence, forced resettlement, politically motivated applications for deletion cited as reasons for many missing names.

When Harbour MLA P.K. Sekar Babu of the DMK received petitions alleging that the names of several Muslims in his constituency in Chennai were missing, he decided to check if the charge was true. When he found the complaints to be valid, he appealed to the District Election Officer to include the deleted names on the rolls again.

While work on including the missing names started a few months ago, many of the Muslim voters who complained are still waiting for their names to be included on the rolls, keeping their fingers crossed and hoping it would be done before the Lok Sabha elections.

“Electoral officials said the deletion of names of Muslims was unintentional,” said Mr. Babu. “The names would be included after the application forms for inclusion of names are processed. Most of the voters have submitted the application forms. The names are expected to be included in the supplementary roll,” he added. The supplementary rolls will be released in a few days.

According to his estimates, more than 10,000 Muslim voters had been removed from the rolls in the Harbour Assembly segment which is part of the Chennai Central parliamentary constituency.

Shahul Hameed, a voter in the Harbour segment, said more than 500 names, including his, were missing from the rolls in his residential neighbourhood. “We have created awareness among the voters to push for inclusion if their names are missing on the voter rolls. Our volunteers have started helping them apply,” he added.

Chennai Corporation Commissioner and Chennai District Election Officer G. Prakash said election officials had been directed to look into complaints of deletion of voters. Clarifying that any exclusions had neither been intentional nor done with any ulterior motive, he said most possibly it was a result of voters having moved houses without updating the voter list.

Another official from the district election office in Chennai explained further: more than 49% of the voters in Chennai lived in rental accommodation. “A number of residents shift houses frequently, but they fail to change the address on the rolls,” said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity. “We remove the voters from the rolls only after checking the households,” the official added.

“It is a fundamental right of any citizen to get the name enrolled on the electoral rolls,” said Mr. Prakash. “Every deletion has a record. We will check the record to find if the voter was absent or had shifted during the visit of officials for summary revision of rolls,” the official added.

Missing millions

According to data compiled by the Centre for Research and Debates in Development Policy (CRDDP), more than three crore Muslim voters and four crore Dalit voters are missing from the electoral rolls across the country. The organisation and its allies have started a countrywide campaign to include such ‘missing voters’ on the electoral rolls ahead of the Lok Sabha elections.

M. G. Dawood Miakhan, one of the campaign’s leaders from Chennai and a grandson of Constituent Assembly member ‘Quaid-e-Millat’, said: “Six members from a household of descendants of Quaid-e-Millat, in Chromepet within the Chennai Metropolitan Area, were removed from the rolls. After the campaign, some of the names have been included on the rolls.”

Former Chennai Corporation Council Floor Leader V. Sukumar Babu claimed that more than 7,000 Dalit voters resettled from slums along the River Cooum in the Chepauk-Tiruvallikeni Assembly segment may not be able to vote in this Lok Sabha election. “The election officials in every district have to be proactive in including the names of voters belonging to the socially weaker sections on the rolls,” the former councillor said. “The government has used force to resettle the Dalits from the slums in Chennai, to locations about 40 km away.” He said election officials ought to have have visited the new homes of the resettled Dalit families and included their names on the electoral rolls.

CRDDP, USIPI (US-India Policy Institute) and RayLabs also claim they have empirical evidence to prove that many Indians would be unable to vote in the Lok Sabha elections.

According to research conducted by Abusaleh Shariff, Chief Scholar at the Washington D.C.-based USIPI and President CRDDP, the exclusion of genuine voters is double the size of the average population in the case of the Muslim population.

In the past year, CRDDP sources claim, they had unearthed evidence to show that 150 to 180 million Indian citizens had been left out of the rolls and therefore, would be unable to vote.

In a bid to address this issue, CRDDP has initiated ‘Mission 2019-no voter left behind.’

Efforts are being made to execute this mission in all states of India except in Assam where the issue of voter list is under government’s consideration through the National Register of Citizens.

As part of the efforts to trace the missing voters and restore their right to vote, a large number of volunteers in constituencies of Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Delhi, Gujarat, Jharkhand, Karnataka, Kerala, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Telangana, Odisha, Uttarakhand and West Bengal have started utilising the Missing Voters App, available on the Android and iOS platforms, to include names on the rolls ahead of the Lok Sabha elections. Maharashtra, with 13,528 volunteers, has the highest number of such people who have been helping trace the missing voters.

The App has the details of polling booth, street names and house number of the missing voters. Users can download the app, visit the household and enrol new voters. “Thousands of people not only enrolled their names, but also worked as volunteers in bringing the missing voters back in the electoral rolls across the country,” said Khalid Saifullah, who leads a small team of professionals who have worked on enrolment of the missing voters in various parts of the country.

As on March 20, a total of 76,678 volunteers across the country downloaded the Missing Voters App and have been able to successfully enrol 36,448 missing voters. “After the announcement of the schedule for the Lok Sabha elections, the drive had spread with lightning speed with over 31,733 downloads in just three days,” Mr. Saifullah explained.

RayLabs Technologies has been able to carry out data mining of the publicly- available electoral rolls and built household size reports for 800 Assembly constituencies in the country. “It identified that the percentage of households having only one voter in all religious communities is 11%. But as per voter rolls it is 20% in Muslim and dalit communities. As per Census 2011, the percentage of single person household should be less than 5%. There is variation between two govt databases, so we considered 80% of households with one voter as missing voter households and started a field survey,” added Mr.Saifullah.

Further, he said: “Based on the results of the field survey in assembly constituencies such as Nagpur South West, Nagpur South, Katol and Nanded North of Maharashtra, we proved that people having voter ids and staying in the same location have been removed from the rolls in an arbitrary manner. Similarly, missing voters in areas such as Vellore and Chennai have also been traced.”

For example, the voters who are not on the rolls can include the names before the last date of filing of nominations in a particular constituency, if they have already applied for enrolment. Users can also get a link for the App via SMS by giving a missed call to 8099 683 683.

According to the study, misuse of Form 7 has also been found to be increasing in many Parliamentary constituencies. Political parties reportedly check Form 20 to know which party has secured votes in each polling booth. After analysing the data, they select the households which they assume to be ‘other party voters’ and apply Form 7 online to delete the names. “Technically it is expected that proper verification should happen before removing of voters but in some cases, verification doesn’t happen and some names get deleted,” said Mr.Saifullah.

The inadequate manpower available with the election machinery in each of the District Election Offices across the country is said to be the key challenge in tacking the issue of arbitrary deletion of names of voters belonging to a particular community. Many of the data entry operators and other personnel associated with the process of inclusion or deletion of voters’ names are found to be unskilled and untrained.

Ignorance of the process is yet another challenge, according to the CRDDP study. For example, a chunk of the Muslims and dalits are economically weaker, and they stay in rented houses. When they shift homes they do not change the address on the voter card. When booth level officers come for verification they will not find the voter and delete the name. The study points to illiteracy as another factor. As per census, 42% of Muslims are illiterate, and remain unaware of the process of deletion and inclusion of names on the electoral rolls.

“I blame administrative failures and lack of control of booth level officers for this situation,” said Mr. Saifullah.