The Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls, which started with Bihar last year, follows a two-step process: publication of a draft roll and then a final roll. The former presented an opportunity as well as a threat to people removed or retained from the pre-SIR roll. The opportunity was in making a claim that the deletion on account of ASDD (absent-shifted-dead-duplicated) was incorrect. The threat was either being unmapped with the previous SIR roll or being flagged for a so-called logical discrepancy.
The logical discrepancy criteria did not exist during the Bihar SIR. It first attracted attention when the process was underway in West Bengal. West Bengal is also the only state where electors flagged under this category continue to face adjudication and cannot vote. This has made logical discrepancy notices a big flashpoint in the ongoing SIR debate. Not all states have published detailed data on logical discrepancies, although some in the third phase of SIR have done so. These include Delhi, Telangana, Karnataka and Uttarakhand. While the first three have published a detailed list for most booths in each assembly constituency (AC), Uttarakhand has only published summary statistics; Karnataka has additionally published a summary without giving a break-up of the notices, which can only be obtained by scraping the booth-wise PDFs. To be sure, the Maharashtra CEO also appears to have published lists, but the CEO’s website has the list for only six districts so far. It is possible that other CEOs have such lists, but HT could only find the lists on the CEO’s website for only the states/UTs listed here. What exactly can we say about this category? Here is what an HT analysis shows.
