Bihar SIR: EC data unclear if electors filing fresh applications are missing in draft rolls or are first time voters
What is not clear though is that out of the total 63,571 Form 6 applications filed, there is no information on how many are first-time voters who have attained 18 years and how many are electors who had not filled the enumeration forms leading to their names not getting included in the draft rolls published on August 1.
Form 6 is the application for inclusion of names in electoral rolls. According to Rule 13(a) of the Registration of Electors Rules, 1961 on 'Form for claims and objections': 'Every claim shall be in Form 6 and signed by the person desiring his name to be included in the roll'. Thus, it is this form that new voters who have turned 18 years or above use for registration in electoral rolls.
Political parties on the ground in Bihar have claimed that when one is not able to find their name in the draft rolls, people are approaching the registration officials concerned and are being directed to fill Form 6, which means that if a person has been voting for decades, but their name is excluded from the draft list, then they will have to fill up Form 6 afresh. And when the new electoral roll will be published, their name will be published in the new voter's column. So, it will be nearly impossible to figure out how many genuinely new voters were added in the electoral roll and how many were old voters.
According to former Election Commissioner Ashok Lavasa, this situation 'can be because the exercise of Special Intensive Revision in Bihar is being treated as a preparation of electoral rolls de novo and names not in draft rolls are not being treated as a case of deletion, but rather a case of application for inclusion'.
'Thus, in the usual process of revision of rolls, a notice is served on the person whose name is deleted which is not considered necessary here by the ECI as per their statement to the court. It is only after the publication of the final electoral rolls on September 25 that the DEOs would consider appeals against the decision of EROs and based on their decision, changes made in the electoral roll will be separately reflected,' he told The Hindu.
The Supreme Court on Tuesday heard a batch of petitions challenging the Bihar SIR exercise.
In the previous hearing, a Bench of Justices Surya Kant and Joymalya Bagchi cautioned the poll body that the court would 'not hesitate to act' if the revised list reflected 'mass exclusions'. The petitioners have criticised the SIR process as a form of 'citizenship screening'.
The Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR), which has challenged the EC's June 24 order directing the SIR, last week moved a fresh application seeking directions to the poll panel to publish the names of roughly 65 lakh deleted voters, along with the reasons for deletion.
The EC had responded that while the list of deleted voters has been provided to political parties on the ground, it was not bound to give the segregated list specifying the reasons for each deletion. It also said that no names would be deleted from the draft list without specifying the grounds for removal.
According to EC data released on Tuesday, 63,571 Form 6 applications along with declarations had been received from new electors on attaining 18 years of age or above, while claims and objections received directly from electors with respect to the draft rolls for inclusion of eligible electors and exclusion of ineligible electors was 13,97,034 out of which 341 had been disposed of.
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