‘Bihar SIR raises more questions than answers’

New Delhi: Raising several questions over the SIR of electoral rolls in Bihar, the Congress on Wednesday asked why the Election Commission has not made the final list of all deleted voters available and claimed that there are more than five lakh duplicate voters in the final voter list.

The Congress’ Empowered Action Group of Leaders and Experts (EAGLE), formed to monitor the conduct of free and fair elections by the Election Commission of India (ECI), said the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) raises more questions than answers.

The ECI undertook SIR in Bihar and released a final list of 7.42 crore registered voters for the upcoming state elections, it said.

“Despite several pleas by the Congress party, the ECI has not made available a machine-readable voter list which makes any analysis of the voter list very cumbersome. Further, the ECI did not make the voter list available as one consolidated list but released it as 90,000 separate individual files in image format,” the Congress’ panel said in a statement.

Why is the ECI so hesitant to make voter lists easy to analyse, the panel asked. “What is it scared of?” it said.

After a preliminary analysis of the Bihar voter list, the Congress party has the questions for the ECI, it said.