Ahead of Telangana Elections, EC Removes 22 Lakh Voter Names From Electoral Rolls

The Telangana Congress has raised concerns about discrepancies in the final voter list, alleging multiple entries of voters.

New Delhi: Ahead of the Telangana Assembly elections, the Election Commission of India has removed over 22 lakh voter names from the electoral rolls.

Telangana Chief Electoral Officer (CEO) Vikas Raj announced that more than three crore people (3,17,17,389) are eligible to vote, but 22,02,168 names have been deleted in the past two years, including 4,89,574 voters from the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) and surrounding areas, the News Minute reported.

Additionally, 2,47,756 deceased voters have been removed from the electoral roll this year, the report said, citing a note from the Telangana CEO.

The Telangana Congress has raised concerns about discrepancies in the final voter list, alleging multiple entries of voters. The Congress alleged that the actual number of voters in the state is much lesser than 3,17,17,389 published by the EC.

This issue of voter list discrepancies is not new, as the 2018 Assembly elections in Telangana also saw 22 lakh voter names deleted without informing the voters. The then CEO, Rajat Kumar, had acknowledged that many voters could indeed not exercise their right and issued an apology.

Congress senior vice president G. Niranjan told TNM that the party would conduct a survey of its own and approach the Telangana high court to refute the EC’s voter list.

“After we brought up the issue with the GHMC Commissioner, who is also the District Election officer for the Hyderabad District, we were informed that 3,175 multiple entries were found on verification in the Bahadurpura constituency alone, of which roughly 2,120 are still not cleared,” Niranjan told TNM.

In a letter written to Telangana Congress General Secretary Feroz Khan, the CEO mentioned that in the Nampally constituency under Hyderabad district, there are 46, 396 additional names in the electoral list as of September 1, the report added.