Over 24 Lakh Fake Names Deleted From Voter List in Madhya Pradesh in 6 Months

Bhopal: As part of the ongoing efforts to rectify voters’ lists ahead of Assembly polls later this year, the Election Commission of India has deleted 24 lakh fake names from the voters’ lists in Madhya Pradesh.

A recent draft of the voters’ list published by the ECI had 4.94 crore listed voters in MP while the draft which was published in January this year had 5.07 crore voters.

The action follows the continued process of vote list revision by the EC. The list has seen names of more than 24 lakh dead, shifted, absentee and repeat/duplicate voters being deleted from the voter lists from a total of 230 Assembly seats.

However, this is for the first time that such a large number of voters have been deleted from the voters’ lists in Madhya Pradesh.

Over 10.69 lakh new voters have been added in the voters’ lists of the same 230 Assembly seats where elections are slated in November-December 2018, which put the total number of voters in all constituencies at over 4.94 crore on July 31, 2018.

The top five Assembly segments which reported maximum deletion of voters include Huzur in Bhopal represented by BJP MLA Rameshwar Sharma (36,205), Indore-1 represented by BJP’s Sudarshan Gupta (33,073), Indore-5 represented by BJP’s Mahendra Hardia (31,789), Narela represented by BJP’s minister of state Vishwas Sarang (29,606) and Bhopal South-West represented by minister Umashankar Gupta (25,820).

Kolaras and Mungaoli constituencies that went for bypolls early this year and caused a flutter in MP politics with Congress alleging heavy presence of fake voters saw deletion of 23,878 and 10,095 names respectively from the electoral rolls.

Among prominent Congress faces, party chief whip in Assembly, Ramniwas Rawat’s constituency Vijaypur has lost 8609 voters, party working president Jitu Patwari’s constituency Rau saw deletion of 26,359 voters while senior leader Sundarlal Tiwari’s constituency Gurh lost 9349 voters in the ongoing process.

It’s important to add that Congress had stoked a major controversy in early June while complaining to the ECI that there were over 60 lakh bogus voters, an accusation trashed by the ECI following an investigation.

MP Chief Electoral Officer VL Kantarao has fixed August 22 as the date for raising objections against this draft voters’ list.

Recently on Aug 10, the Supreme Court had agreed to hear a plea of senior Congress leader Kamal Nath seeking random verification of Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) machines in the upcoming Madhya Pradesh Assembly polls.

The leader, in the plea, had sought a direction to the ECI to randomly verify VVPAT slips with EVM votes at 10 per cent of polling stations in every constituency.