Goa Chief Minister Pramod Sawant on Thursday told the Goa Legislative Assembly that he would request the Election Commission of India (ECI) for an extension in the deadline for people to file appeals against deletions from the voters’ list as part of the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls.
During a discussion in the House, Opposition members pointed out that some “genuine” voters were finding their names marked as “dead, permanently shifted, duplicate and not traceable”.
Leader of Opposition Yuri Alemao of the Congress said genuine voters cannot lose their franchise simply because they were not at home when a booth-level officer (BLO) visited. He said the door-to-door process of SIR, conducted within a short window, “cannot become the sole test of a voter’s existence”.
“There should be transparency in the SIR process. When voters see their names missing from the draft rolls without prior mandatory notice, their trust in the electoral system is shaken. Mass deletion based on non-collection of forms is procedurally flawed. Non-collection of a form cannot legally mean that the voter has shifted, or is dead, duplicate, or ineligible. This approach equates absence with disqualification, which is neither fair nor lawful,” Alemao said.
He said that over 1,00,042 voters have been marked for deletion mainly because enumeration forms were not collected.
Carlos Ferreira, Congress MLA from Aldona, said that in one booth in his constituency, more than 90% of voters have either been marked as “unmapped” or have been deleted on account of being marked dead, shifted or due to duplication, claiming that many among them are well-known in the village, but have been knocked off the list as “untraceable”.
Chief Minister Sawant said the intention of the SIR is to ensure weeding out of fake entries, duplicate voters and non-citizens. “I want to assure that no eligible Goan will see his name deleted. I will request the Election Commission to extend the time period to appeal notices and voter name deletions. The intention of the SIR is clear that it has to be about one citizen, one vote,” Sawant said.
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Goa Forward Party chief Vijai Sardesai said the exercise has erased genuine Goan voters, while still failing to detect illegal migrants or duplicate registrations. He said that linking voter rolls to automated databases without human verification will create a permanent, invisible deletion pipeline, making the right to vote a bureaucratic privilege instead of a constitutional right.
Over one lakh names were deleted from the draft electoral rolls in Goa, marking a deletion of 8.44%. According to data shared by Goa’s chief electoral officer last month, out of 11,85,034 electors, 10,84,992 (91.56%) submitted their enumeration forms. According to the data, of the 1,00,042 electors deleted from draft electoral rolls, 25,574 are dead; 29,729 are untraceable or absent; 40,469 have permanently shifted; 1,997 are already enrolled at multiple places in the electoral roll; and 2,273 are listed as others, who are not willing to register as an elector for some reason.
