Bengaluru: The Special Intensive Revision was supposed to clean the rolls. In Mahadevapura, it left 803 voter IDs attached to 397 people.
Karnataka's Chief Electoral Officer's office has now acknowledged the discrepancy, describing it as the product of "procedural circumstances during data processing" rather than a question of who is entitled to vote.
The numbers came out of an examination of the Mahadevapura assembly constituency, a fast-growing part of Bengaluru where the rolls run into lakhs. The same exercise turned up a second problem: the same Elector Photo Identity Card number appearing in the final electoral rolls of two different assembly constituencies.
That second finding is the one with teeth. A duplicate name is a clerical problem. One EPIC number sitting in two constituencies goes to the heart of the one-person-one-vote principle, and it is precisely what the SIR was meant to eliminate.
The office has explained how it happened. Some applicants had submitted multiple Form 6 applications for inclusion through the Citizen Service Portal during the revision, and those applications were processed independently, generating multiple EPIC numbers for the same person. On identical numbers appearing in two constituencies, it said Form 8 applications seeking migration had in some cases been approved and names added to the new constituency's rolls, while the corresponding Form 7 deletions in the old constituency stayed pending. Roll operations had been frozen ahead of final publication under statutory provisions, so those entries survived.
The cases have gone to District Election Officers, Additional District Election Officers and Electoral Registration Officers for verification and remedial action under the law. The office has not said how many of the 803 IDs will be struck off, or by when.
Mahadevapura is the constituency where the "vote chori" controversy first broke, after Leader of the Opposition Rahul Gandhi alleged that more than one lakh fake or stolen votes had been engineered in the 2024 Bengaluru Central Lok Sabha contest. The seat is held by the BJP.
The CEO's office had earlier said it had received no formal complaints about duplicate entries and was monitoring cases flagged on social media and by political parties.
Election officials have not announced the next step. The options are a targeted re-verification of the 397 records, a wider audit of constituencies where EPIC numbers repeat across boundaries, or both.