Election Commission Resolves Duplicate Voter Card Number Issue: Report

The Election Commission has resolved the issue of voter cards having similar numbers and those with such cards have been issued fresh ones with new numbers, sources said Tuesday.

The number of similar electoral photo identity card or EPIC numbers found were "miniscule", averaging to around one in four polling stations, they said.

During the field-level verification, it was found that holders of such similar EPIC numbers were genuine electors in different assembly constituencies and different polling stations, the sources said.

Every voter's name is in the electoral roll of the polling station, where he or she is an ordinary resident. Having had an EPIC of similar number never enabled any such person to vote at any other polling station. Thus, the issue of a similar EPIC could not have impacted the results of any elections, they asserted.

Amid allegation of voter list fudging by opposition parties, including the TMC, the EC had asserted in March that it will address the "decades-long" matter in the next three months.

To resolve this long-pending problem, the entire electoral database of over 99 crore electors was searched by chief electoral officers of all the 36 states and Union territories and electoral registration officers of all the 4,123 assembly constituencies across India in all the 10.50 lakh polling stations, they pointed out.

On an average, there are about 1,000 electors per polling station.

The genesis of the issue has been traced from 2005, when various states and Union territories were using assembly constituency-wise different alphanumeric series in a decentralised manner.

These series had to be changed again in 2008, after delimitation of constituencies. During this period, some assemblies "erroneously" continued to use either the old series or because of typographic errors they used the series allotted to some other constituencies, the sources explained.

A senior TMC leader aware of the voter card number issue said, "We will react when the EC speaks on record and not through "sources".

The Trinamool Congress flagged the issue of duplicate voter identity card numbers in different states and accused the EC of a cover-up.

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