Delhi CM Rekha Gupta, Arvind Kejriwal among 3.16mn voters get notices for SIR ‘discrepancies’

Delhi chief minister Rekha Gupta and Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) chief Arvind Kejriwal were among more than 3.16 million voters, or roughly a third of all electors in the city, served notices for “discrepancies” after the special intensive revision (SIR) of electoral rolls in the national capital, said officials involved in the exercise.

The office of the Delhi chief electoral officer (CEO) late on Friday published the list of electors served notices, nearly three weeks after the draft electoral roll of voters in the city was released on August 31. Flagged voters must now submit their responses and documentation with election authorities to be included in the final roll.

Electors on the lists are categorised within two sections: “no mapping” – voters who could not be linked with the electoral roll of the previous revision, in 2002; and “logical discrepancies” – voters whose entries had inconsistencies with the previous roll.

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Of the 9,753,577 million electors whose names were published in Delhi’s draft electoral rolls after the SIR, 1,379,785 have now been placed in the “no mapping” category and 1,933,134 were tagged as bearing “logical discrepancies”.

To be sure, the two categories account for 3,312,919 electors, though the latest figure released by the election authorities puts the number of notices generated so far at 3,163,930. Officials said this gap is because thousands more notices are still to be generated.

Voters served notices must submit their replies and the documents required to the electoral registration officer.

The election commission must decide on all notices by October 29, and the Capital’s final electoral roll is scheduled to be published on November 4.

The draft rolls for the national capital published on August 31 shaved off a third of voters, listing 9.75 million names, a drop from 14.5 million as of the June 30 roll.

Among the six metro cities – Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata, Chennai, Bengaluru, and Hyderabad – Delhi’s 32.8% deletions at the draft stage are the second lowest.

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Gupta, an elector in Shalimar Bagh assembly constituency, was flagged under the “logical discrepancies” category on the basis of details in her enumeration form. The discrepancy concerned the age difference between her and her parents.

The Shalimar Bagh ERO on Saturday said Gupta’s entry had since been verified. A notice was issued to her and the designated booth level officer (BLO) carried out a physical field verification. After the facts and documents she provided were verified, the entry was validated and “parked for inclusion” in the final electoral roll, the ERO said in a statement.

Authorities also issued notices to Kejriwal, his wife Sunita Kejriwal, his parents Gobind Ram Kejriwal and Gita Devi, and his son Pulkit Kejriwal, because their details could not be mapped with the last SIR. The family is registered in New Delhi constituency.