Even though citizens groups and activists have been working on the issue of an unaccountable Election Commission of India (ECI) for years now, it took the explosive press conference of Rahul Gandhi on August 7, for a barrage of citizens’ journalists on digital media to get into the act.
For instance, the matter of 39-year-old Sushama Gupta having six entries in the electoral rolls was posted on X by Alt News journalist Abhishek Kumar. A cross-verification exercise was conducted by the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative (CHRI) and has been made public by Venkatesh Nayak, its director. Sushama Gupta, a 39-year-old resident of the Nalasopara assembly constituency in Maharashtra’s Palghar district, appeared to figure six times in the electoral roll, with each entry carrying a different EPIC number as pointed out on X on Tuesday (August 12).
Thereafter, Pratik Sinha founder of Alt News, put out this tweet that educated thousands on how to convert ECI’s unreadable electoral rolls to a readable software.
Soon, the Common Wealth Human Rights Initiative (CHRI) undertook its own cross verification exercise between 5 to 6:30 pm on August 12, 2025 using the publicly accessible voter list database and the Search in Electoral Roll facility created by the Election Commission of India (ECI).
How did they go about probing?
The aforementioned media report states that the name of one individual Ms. Sushma Gupta figures five times on the electoral rolls of Nilemore locality and once again in the voter list of Tulinj locality of the same Vidhan Sabha constituency. So the CHRI decided to cross check this claim on two fronts:
1) Using the image of the voter list displayed in the media story, CHRI activists keyed in the EPIC numbers mentioned against Ms. Sushma Gupta to see if the ECI’s Voter List Portal throws up any data; and
2) They then downloaded the entire voter list of the Nilemore locality from the same portal to check whether the claim about multiple mentions is true. This voter list downloaded from the ECI’s Portal states that it was last updated on 29/10/2024. Perhaps this list was prepared after the summary revision of the electoral rolls ahead of the Vidhan Sabha elections in Maharashtra on 20th November, 2024.
Caveat: The image displayed in the media report mentioned above contains photographs of voters also. So probably this image might be of the voter lists provided to the polling agent(s) for use on the day of polling. The CHRI was unable to ascertain whether this list with photographs was used during the Lok Sabha polls or the later Vidhan Sabha polls held in Maharashtra in 2024 because the voter list the activists have downloaded from the ECI’s portal does not contain any photographs as per ECI’s policy to protect the privacy of voters.
Findings:
1) The name of Ms. Sushama Gupta (not Sushma Gupta as mentioned in the above media story) occurs multiple times in the attached voter list of 286- Nilemore Polling Station which is located at St. Mary’s High School, Ground Floor, North side, Room No. 9, Nilemore (the complete voter list has also been provided by the organisation;
2) The name of Ms. Sushama Gupta occurs five times (5) on page no. 26 and once on page 44 of the voter list. Out of the five occurrences on page no. 26 only one of them carries the “DELETED” watermark across the entry as of today. This is the entry connected with the 390-Tulinj locality displayed in the image published in the aforementioned media story. All six entries carry different EPIC numbers and all five entries for Nilemore locality are shown as live;
3) In five of these six entries, Ms. Sushama Gupta is shown as a female aged 39 years, whose husband is one Sanjay Gupta, with House No. displayed as Mata Jivdani Chowl;
4) In one of the five live entries, the individual’s name is shown only as “gupta Gupta” (EPIC: WEH8746877) but with the same age, husband’s name and House No. This is intriguing as to how the surname and the first name were allowed to be identical;
5) The image of the voter list with photographs displayed in the aforementioned media report does not match with the voter list downloaded from ECI’s portal in one respect. The serial nos. do not match. In the image displayed in the media report, the serial nos. shown for this individual are: 1316, 1319, 1320, 1321, 1322 and 1323. In the voter list which we downloaded from the ECI’s portal, the serial nos. against which this individual is named are: 712, 715, 716, 717 (DELETED entry), 718 and 1235. This is another intriguing discrepancy. One plausible explanation could be that the image displayed in the aforementioned media report might have been from the voter list used during the Lok Sabha elections held earlier in April-May 2024;
6) When CHRI activists searched the ECI’s database using the “Search in Electoral Roll” facility applying all six EPIC numbers, they found the same name popping up six times today, with the same personal details as mentioned above (the screenshots of the search results are in the 2nd attachment below). The entry shown as DELETED on the Voter list did not contain a similar remark on this database;
7) Last but not the least, when they clicked the “View Details” link given against each entry we found that the same District Election Officer (Mr. Govind Bobde), the same Electoral Registration Officer (Mr. Shekhar Ghadge) and the same Booth Level Officer (Ms. Pallavi Sawant) are named against all these entries (in the 2nd attachment the search result page for each entry is followed by a screenshot of the Voter Details Page). The mobile phone nos. of the ERO and the BLO are also given. It is intriguing that none of these officers discovered the multiple entries at the time of finalising the voter list for two rounds of elections, namely the Lok Sabha and the Vidhan Sabha elections.
This is but one claim of discrepancy being reported by the media which the CHRI has been able to cross check given the very limited human resources available at our disposal. It is hoped that other electoral reforms advocates will cross check other claims about voter list discrepancies and publish their results.
Clearly, the ERO, DEO, the Chief Electoral Officer, Maharashtra and the ECI have much to account for to the citizenry.
Related:
ECI to SC: Voter ID insufficient for Bihar roll, defends citizenship verification power
Non-Electors Within Electors: ECI reports over 61 lakh potential exclusions