In the 2014 general elections in Telangana, there were 2,81,65,885 electors. During the special summary revision (SSR) of electoral rolls in 2016, the number dropped to 2,60,06,921 — a steep drop of 21,58,964.
In the 2018 Telangana Assembly elections, the number rose to 2,80,66,331 voters. Under the current SSR, the number of electors is set to cross the 2014 figure for the first time. “This massive dip in the number of electors in 2016 was due to the use of software to weed out specific voters under the National Electoral Rolls Purification and Authentication Programme (NERP-AP),” says security expert Srinivas Kodali, who used the Right to Information (RTI) application to dig up information stored in the offices of Election Commission in Delhi and Hyderabad.
Deletion methodology
The methodology used to delete voters has been shared for the first time by the EC. “CEO office supplied/shared the electoral roll/EPIC database with the State Resident Data Hub (SRDH) application. The application match the electoral roll/ EPIC entry with Aadhaar/Ration Card/ or any other departmental data with wider coverage of population above 18 years of age and seed the Aadhaar number in the electoral roll...For EPIC having less than 50% matching with UID Aaadhar has not been incorporated against their EPIC number (sic),” the RTI says.
The RTI qualifies the statement about what the EC did when the Aadhaar details did not match the EPIC details and the name was removed, “the Block Level Officer gone for door to door verification”.
This statement is contradicted by the letter sent by the then CEO, Bhanwar Lal: “There is poor progress of the programme in GHMC area and the door to door verification has not been conducted properly”.
Effectively, if the elector did not meet certain conditions in an algorithm, the name was deleted. The elector count which was 2,84,37,087 at the beginning of 2015 dropped to 2,53,27,785 at the beginning of 2018 — a drop of 31,09,302 voters (see chart).
The Aadhaar linkage in 2015 was patchy with 45% in the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation area and 84.45% in the rest of Telangana.
The CEO cited the difficult conditions in which he was tasked with the job of NERP-AP on a pilot basis.
“Commission has been requested to declare the NERP-AP as a revision of rolls programme so that the district machinery comes on deputation to ECI and we could have better implementation without disturbance of electoral staff. But the commission has not issued any such orders in this regard. Almost for 20 days, there was no work under NERPAP because almost all the government employees were busy in Pushkaralu in both the States,” says the letter released as an answer to the RTI application.
Algorithm game
The EC also revealed the algorithms used to delete names. One of them is Soundex which uses phonetic algorithm for indexing names by sound as pronounced in English. Levenstein distance algorithm which is a string metric for measuring the difference between two sequences.
Short and long name algorithm and String Shuffling algorithm were the others used for cross-checking names.
Incidentally, when the first time the EC used the Electoral Voting Machines in 1982 in 50 polling booths in Kerala’s Paravoor assembly constituency, the Supreme Court ordered a re-poll in booths where they were used.
The SC cited a technicality that Representation of People Act did not allow for electronic voting. The government of the day was forced to amend the RPA adding Section 61A to RPA to allow for use of EVMs.
