BENGALURU: Shortly after the first estimates of a poor voter turnout emerged on Thursday, commentators on social media started skewering Bengalureans for their infamous indifference towards the electoral process. But expert analysis on Friday suggested that bloated voters’ rolls, featuring redundant entries, may be the reason behind the city’s embarrassing turnout figure of 54.13% this time.Simply put, the rolls perhaps overstated the size of the population of eligible voters, literally setting up Bengaluru for poor polling figures.“The size of the electorate projected by the Election Commission is highly inflated considering the population of Bengaluru. When you calculate on an inflated base value, the turnout would be naturally shown less. It’s a wrong calculation,” said voter list analyst PG Bhat.Poll officials launched an aggressive drive to enrol voters ahead of the 2018 year’s assembly elections. They recorded an electorate size of 89.72 lakh, up from 71.3 lakh. The rolls were revised before the 2019 Lok Sabha elections with deletion of 4 lakh names and addition of around 5 lakh. The new electorate figure stood at 90,87,845.Bengaluru’s population was 96.22 lakh in the 2011 census, and it has now gone up to 1.31 crore, according to BBMP officials. Of this, 8 to 10 lakh residents are migrants who are not enrolled as voters in the city. If you adjust their numbers in the calculation, the effective size of the voting public would be 1.21 core. According to the national standards, the electorate should be 60% of the population. Considering this, the realistic size of the city’s electorate will be 72.6 lakh.As per the Election Commission’s data, 47,96,390 people voted in Bengaluru on Thursday. If the base value is 72.6 lakh, the turnout was a respectable 66%, and not 54.13% as recorded by the EC. The official figure places the city at the bottom of the state chart for poll crowds in phase 1.“A turnout of 66% is moderately good, if not the best. It’s unfair to blame citizens when they are not actually responsible for poor official numbers,” political analyst and psephologist Sandeep Shastri.The redundancy in the voters’ list includes duplications, deceased electors, fake names, double entries of people who have shifted to a new address, and migrants from nearby districts who registered as voters in Bengaluru only because they wanted a valid address proof. In the latter category, many migrants retained their old voter IDs and finally voted in their hometowns.“We have taken a note of the issue and have started cleansing the voter list,” said BBMP additional commissioner (elections) Dr Natesh.Officials are exploring if the rolls can be brought under the Election Registration Officer and be centrally managed by the EC. “Currently, the electoral rolls are being manged at the state level. Once the rolls are brought under the ERO net, which is powered by technology, duplicate entries will be weeded out automatically and the lists will be cleaned up considerably,” Dr Natesh said.Sanjiv Kumar, chief electoral officer of Karnataka, said it was citizens’ responsibility to ensure the integrity of the voters’ list. “People should check the rolls regularly and ensure that their names are in the proper place. They should not forget to get the names deleted when the case arises,” he said.