In an affidavit on Sunday, 10 August, the Election Commission of India has informed the Supreme Court that no rules do not warrant the Commission to produce the list of voters falling from the electoral rolls due to death, repetition, or not being found at the given address. It has also been claimed that it is not obliged to cite the reasons for voters to leave the electoral roll.

Over the weekend, ECI also changed the draft electoral roll in non-medieval format on the service portal of voters from machine-elective format. The original PDF was replaced with copies scanned by those PDFs that barely present them, if not completely unfit, for digital search.

Bihar’s Chief Electoral Officer replied, denied any change in the list, forced Scroll.in, Which reported a sudden change in the format, to call the CEO’s bluff. This was the format and not the list that had changed, the portal said. This time, the CEO has had radio silence.

Gracefully Altnews The following posted on X was posted: “Bihar’s Chief Electoral Officers are misleading people. The Election Commission has actually removed the Sir Draft 2025 original PDF files from the Voters Services Portal and replaced them with copies scanned by the original PDF in which the search function does not work.”

Altnews However, founder Pratik Sinha managed to find a way to add a text layer to Bihar Sir files, which have been converted from digital to unlimited-by-machine (format) by ECI. Sinha wondered if this digital age could inspire ECI to do so, and with all the promotions around Digital India.

Monday, August 11, Reporters collective, an independent A group of investigative journalists have also claimed to crack the list with the help of independent data analysts. Matching the draft electoral rolls for Valmikinagar assembly constituency in Bihar, the collective immediately found more than 1,000 perfect matches of voters in Uttar Pradesh. Name, age, and listed relatives (compulsory areas in the ECI database) were exactly the same in the database of both states.

“Their addresses, however, were different. In thousands of other cases, the voter’s name or relatives were replaced by 1-3 letters in spelling. In some cases, the two databases were changed to 1-4 years and the rest of the credentials were matched,” the report claimed.

Written questions for the ECI headquarters and its Bihar office in Delhi remained inadvertently. None of the two responded. ECI Public Relations Officer Ashok Goyal told The Collective on the phone, “You should keep in mind that whatever discrepancies are, the duration of claims and objections is still going on.”

The ECI would have found it easy to reduce the investigation, with the government’s resources in its command. For example, ECI, within hours, can produce a voter Chhedi Ram in Valmikinagar in Bihar. At the age of 45, his relative’s name is Sukh Ram, and his epic number is UIM3397304.

It could produce another Chhedi Ram in Uttar Pradesh across the border, even at the age of 45 and with a relative named Sukh Ram. The ECI may have clarified the air by pointing that they were completely two separate individuals with different epic numbers.

However, ECI has chosen to ignore the doubts raised by the people on the ground, strengthening the doubts that exercise is malafied. CPI (ML) general secretary Dipankar Bhattacharya has also mentioned that the ECI, when issued daily in its press release, claims that no objections were filed on the electoral rolls, hundreds of objections have been filed by the CPI (ML).

While the CPI (ML) has scored people on the ground – all are alive and live at the same address as before – which have been removed from the draft electoral role in Bihar, these voters, it was found that the authorities are advising to register as fresh voters for new voters, for new voters. This is being told to people, the only way they can return to the electoral roll.

Bhattacharya has felt a terrible trick and believes that the commission’s playbook involves separating some voters and making new nominations to maintain balance. Some new voters may be from other states, as as an investigation Correspondent Indicates?