In an attempt to ease tensions in poll-bound West Bengal, the Election Commission has instructed district officials to stop summoning "unmapped" voters for hearings, provided they can be found in the physical records of the 2002 electoral rolls.
This directive, issued by the Additional Chief Electoral Officer on December 27, effectively pauses a process that had caused widespread anxiety among millions of residents. The order makes it clear that even if the commission’s central software has already generated hearing notices for these individuals, those notices should not be served or acted upon. Instead, officials are being told to cross-verify the names against hard copies of the records and dispose of the cases internally without requiring a personal appearance.
The issue stems from a technical glitch involving the Booth Level Officer (BLO) app. While the software struggled to link current voters to the 2002 digital database — largely because many PDF files from that era hadn't been fully converted into searchable text — ground-level checks revealed that many of these people, or their parents, were clearly listed in the original paper documents. This "mapping" to the 2002 rolls is a central requirement of the ongoing Special Intensive Revision (SIR), which aims to verify the eligibility of the state’s electorate before the 2026 Assembly elections.
The scale of this revision has already reshaped the state's political landscape. Draft rolls published earlier in December showed that more than 58 lakh names have been deleted, causing the total electorate to shrink from 7.66 crore to 7.08 crore. A detailed breakdown of these deletions includes roughly 24 lakh voters marked as deceased, 20 lakh who have permanently shifted, and 12 lakh listed as missing or untraceable. Another 1.8 lakh were flagged as "ghost" entries. The sheer volume of these removals, particularly in strategic border belts and high-profile seats, has led the Trinamool Congress to file a formal objection against the "system-generated" notices, arguing they were disenfranchising legitimate citizens.
By pulling back on the mandatory hearings for the 32 lakh "unmapped" voters who actually appear in the hard copies, the Election Commission is attempting to rectify technical errors that threatened to further complicate an already contentious verification phase. With the present term of the 294-member assembly set to expire in May 2026, the accuracy of these rolls appears imperative for both the ruling TMC and the Opposition.
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