1 man listed as dad of 389, another of 310: SIR detected WB errors, says EC | India News
NEW DELHI: For the last few elections in West Bengal, there are instances of hundreds of voters who have recorded a single person as their father. In the 2025 electoral list, in assembly constituency number 283 (Barabani in Asansol district), a person has been registered as father of 389 voters, Election Commission told Supreme Court on Monday.Such incorrect information is categorised as ‘logical discrepancies’ requiring correction, EC counsel Rakesh Dwivedi told a bench of CJI Surya Kant and Justices Dipankar Datta and Joymalya Bagchi. Dwivedi said the notices issued to such voters are for the purpose of correcting the records and the onus is on the voter to produce documents to record the correct name of their parents.In assembly constituency number 169 (Bally, Howrah district), another person is recorded as father of 310 voters, the EC affidavit said. It said each of seven persons are linked to more than 100 voters as parents; 10 have been recorded as parents of 50 or more voters, another ten as father of 40 or more voters, 14 more as father of 30 or more children, 50 for more than 20 children each, 8,682 for more than 10 children each, 2,06,056 for more than six children, and 4,59,054 for more than five children each.It said as per National Family Health Survey 2019-21, the average household size of India is 4.4. “This denotes that on an average each family consists of 2-3 children. However, in some cases the number of electors linked to one parent is more than 50. This required clarification from voters,” Dwivedi said.“Therefore, cases in which six or more electors have mapped/linked themselves to one person, merits greater scrutiny as regards validity of linkages. In such cases, electoral registration officers are issuing notices to verify whether matching has been done correctly to weed out the chance of fraudulent mapping,” EC said.There are four more grounds on which notices have been issued to electors under ‘logical discrepancy’ category: name of elector in the roll as on Oct 27, 2025 not matching with that mentioned in the 2002 SIR roll; difference of elector’s age as per 2025 roll with parent’s (calculated based on 2002 SIR roll) age is less than 15 years; difference of elector’s age (as per 2025 roll) with parent’s age (calculated based on 2002 SIR roll) is more than 50 years; and difference of elector’s age with grandparent’s age is less than 40 years.