CHENNAI: Questioning the removal of 27 lakh voters as deceased in the draft electoral rolls, CPM State secretary P Shanmugam on Sunday urged the Election Commission of India (ECI) to suspend the ongoing Special Intensive Revision (SIR), alleging serious inconsistencies and large-scale deletions.
In a statement, Shanmugam said the poll panel had earlier claimed that forms were distributed to 99 per cent of voters and collected from 99 per cent, making it implausible that so many voters were deceased.
Tamil Nadu’s average maximum death rate is around 10 per 1,000, including children and minors, he said.
Based on this, annual deaths among 6.41 crore voters would be about 7.69 lakh, far lower than the reported figure of 27 lakh, unless deaths over several years had not been removed earlier, he said.
Referring to population estimates, Shanmugam said Tamil Nadu had about 7.74 crore people at the beginning of the year, of whom around 6.26 crore were adults.
Even after accounting for migration, about six crore voters should have figured in the rolls, he said. The shortfall of 57 lakh voters, he said, had not been explained by the Election Commission with data or logic.
Following the publication of the draft rolls, around one crore voters were deleted. Shanmugam argued that it was not possible to complete new enrolments and address corrections within a short window, which, he said, explained the scale of deletions.
He described it as shocking that names of living persons had been removed, with the reason cited as “dead”.
He pointed out that 68 per cent of the deleted names, about 66 lakh voters, were categorised as “untraceable” or “address not found”. These were not fake voters, he said, but genuine electors omitted due to lack of time and inadequate attention during the revision.
Criticising the requirement that omitted voters submit affidavits and fresh documents for inclusion, Shanmugam called it an unfair penalty for procedural lapses or failures of booth-level officers.
The CPM State committee demanded that the Election Commission halt the SIR process and urged the Supreme Court of India to deliver an early verdict.