India’s voter list deletion sparks outrage over AI use and voting fairness

bengaluru – Faridul Islam’s name is among 9.1 million people. it is deleted Local elections will be held in the Indian state of West Bengal from April 23rd to 29th.

He was working as a fashion designer in a garment company in Kolkata and was removed from the voters’ register because his name was recorded differently from all other documents.

“These are data entry errors by officials. The voter list says I am Faridul, not Faridul. How can it be my fault? I am deprived of my constitutional right to vote for such stupid reasons,” the 40-year-old said, adding that he has voted 15 times in local, state and national elections, including in 2025.

The mass deletion of voters in some states where polls are mandatory has cast doubt on the legitimacy of these elections and caused an uproar among voters and opposition parties.

Protests were also reported in rebel-held West Bengal and Tamil Nadu, two of the five states scheduled to hold local elections in 2026.

The Supreme Court criticized the exercise for using arbitrary conditions and opaque artificial intelligence software.

The voter list cleanup, called Special Intensive Revision (SIR), has been carried out by the Election Commission of India (ECI) and has been ongoing since July 2025 apart from regular reviews.

The ECI said this exercise is urgently needed. Names of duplicate and deceased votersand record voter movement before Congressional elections in several states. It argued before the Supreme Court that since the previous SIR was conducted 21 years ago, between 2002 and 2004, the voter list from that time was marked as the reference list for comparison.

An even bigger fear is that the voter list has become quasi-evidence of Indian citizenship, and disenfranchisement can permanently revoke citizenship and potentially lead to deportation.

In India’s largest voter list clean-up to date, more than 52 million names, or about 10% of all eligible voters, have been removed from electoral rolls in 12 states and one union territory across India.

Most of the deletions are due to voters who have died or emigrated, but thousands of people have complained of unfair deletions due to minor discrepancies flagged by suspicious AI software. Many argue for targeted bias against certain communities.

The millions of deletions in West Bengal were based on discrepancies flagged by an AI-based algorithm used by the ECI to detect discrepancies between data. Voter list and its documents.

Voter details were verified against “logical inconsistencies” flagged by the algorithm, such as differences in the spelling of names between the 2002 and 2025 rolls.

The other trigger was when more than six voters were linked to a single ancestor. The age difference between the voter and the parent exceeds the range of 15 to 45 years. The difference between the age of the grandparents and the age of the voter is less than 40 years. If the voter’s gender does not match the name provided.

Petition against SIR process heard in February 2026the Supreme Court stated: AI-driven The software’s standards were “not based on reality” in India, and assumed, for example, that there would be no underage marriage, that children could not be born late, and that families would have no more than six children.

Ultimately, however, the court did not order the removal to be reversed, and ECI appears to have continued to use the software.

According to the West Bengal state election office, About Of the 9.1 million voters removed, 6 million were subject to adjudication procedures. Of these, 3.2 million people were recognized as voters and reinstated, but 2.7 million people, including Mr. Islam, remained removed.

Voters like him will no longer be able to vote after West Bengal’s electoral register was stoned on April 11. Most affected voters were not given the opportunity to appeal or request a review.

Mr Islam can now ask the Court of Justice for a review, but reportedly not everything is working.

The Supreme Court ordered the ECI to set up a tribunal in Kolkata to hear appeals from voters. On April 16, it ordered the ECI to complete the appeal process by April 21.

But activists supporting the removed voters and opposition parties say the court is barely functioning and that the tight deadline for such a crucial mission, which would require millions of people to travel across West Bengal state to the capital Kolkata, is unreasonable.

Asin Chakraborty, a researcher at the Savar Institute, a policy research institute in Kolkata, analyzed the deletion list. He told ST that in the initial phase of SIR, which excludes absentee, deceased and duplicate voters, most of the names were from urban constituencies like Kolkata and there was no trend in any community.

But in late January, when the ECI introduced a new “logical contradiction” filter that was not included in any law, it “disproportionately affected marginalized groups such as Muslims, women, East Bengali Hindus, and transgender people.”

In constituencies like Nandigram and Bhavanipur, the majority of voters removed were Muslim voters after the logical contradiction category was applied. Nearly 62 percent of the state’s deletions were among women voters, according to a study by the Savard Institute.

Swapna Tripathy, a leader of the domestic workers’ union in the Sundarbans mangrove region, told ST that she is trying to help the 222 removed women voters in South 24 Parganas districts to file their appeals online.

“Most of the women removed are domestic workers, agricultural workers, plastic recyclers, and they are not Rohingya or Bangladeshi, but Indians born and raised in West Bengal. They have all voted before, but suddenly they are no longer Indian,” she said.

She added that they are day laborers who are forced to skip work to establish legitimacy through dozens of photocopies and repeated visits to government offices.

Mrs. Tripathy sparked a series of incidents. A woman named Sabela was removed because she was included in the 2002 voter list. Several surnames were exchanged: Khatun, Begum and Bibi. The arcana was spelled Archhana. And Subol Chandra Das, someone’s father in all IDs, was truncated to Subol Das in the voter list.

“Given the frequency of such inconsistencies in Indian documents, the fact that the government continues to use these errors in high-stakes issues like this suggests that it is either doing it hastily out of a lack of care or with the intention of excluding people,” said Darshana Mitra, an assistant professor of citizenship and immigration law at India’s National Law Institute.

Jauhar Sirkar, former West Bengal state election commissioner, was unequivocal: “SIR is a blatant attack on democracy. The ECI has lost all credibility. People are saying they can get their names back later. What is the point in fixing the post-election mess (in West Bengal)? Disenfranchising millions of people in this way is unconstitutional.”

Mr Sircar warned that “targeted and unwarranted voter deletions will affect the election outcome” and that the electoral calculus was “in turmoil”.

West Bengal’s main opposition party, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), strongly supports SIR, while the ruling Trinamool Congress accuses the ECI of supporting the BJP in an effort to disenfranchise loyal voters.

Research on past elections, including one by think tank CSDS-Lokniti, has shown that women voters tended to support the Trinamool Congress, while Muslims opposed the Hindu nationalist BJP and tended to vote for the more secular Trinamool.

Analysts said the removal of SIR could help the Bharatiya Janata Party win in West Bengal, where it is keen to win the state where it has significantly expanded its grip from three seats in 2016 to 77 out of a total of 294 seats in the 2021 polls.

But Sarkar believes that could backfire.

“Even though the Trinamool Congress has ruled the state for 15 years and is facing anti-incumbency, those who voted against the Trinamool Congress may end up choosing Mamata Banerjee out of anger over the BJP’s SIR,” Sirkar said. trinamool Member of Parliament.

West Bengal is not the only poll-bound state facing this upheaval.

In Tamil Nadu, which goes to polls on April 23, 7.4 million voters have been removed. In Bihar, which will hold elections in November 2025, the figure is 7.42 million, and even more deletions are expected in Uttar Pradesh, where the SIR is currently underway.

It is not clear whether the ECI used the AI ​​algorithm in states other than West Bengal. However, the sheer number of deletions prompted by challenges from Bharatiya Janata Party members in states such as Assam and Bihar has also led to widespread distrust of the law. ECI As a pro-BJP actor.

But the most vocal opposition to SIR has emerged from West Bengal, the state most affected by disenfranchisement.

For decades, Bengali-speaking people have been detained and harassed as foreigners in neighboring Assam, with the number of cases increasing since 2015. The Bharatiya Janata Party-led government has also stepped up measures against “illegal Bangladeshis” by detaining thousands of Bengali-speaking Muslims across the country and forcing them to cross the border into Bangladesh starting in 2025.

Fearful and angry, Mr. Islam filed a petition with ST and wrote a letter to the president, saying, “I don’t want to be deported to Bangladesh. This is not my country. I would rather die in India.”