Kolkata, February 18 – With only four days remaining for the scrutiny of supporting identity documents submitted by voters during the hearing sessions regarding claims and objections to the draft voter list in West Bengal, more than 114,000 documents submitted during the hearing have yet to be uploaded into the system for final examination.
Sources in the Chief Electoral Officer (CEO), West Bengal, said that on Tuesday night, 114,772 documents were still pending upload in the system.
“Currently, two tasks are being carried out in parallel. The first is the scrutiny of documents that have already been uploaded, and the second is the uploading of documents submitted in the final phase of the hearing sessions, which concluded on February 14. The scrutiny of documents submitted in the final phase will be completed once they have been uploaded,” an insider from the CEO’s office explained.
Following these developments, concerns have arisen about the possibility of extending the deadline for completing the scrutiny process, which is February 21.
The districts with the highest number of voter documents yet to be uploaded include Cooch Behar, North Dinajpur, North 24 Parganas, South 24 Parganas, and the electoral district of Kolkata (Uttar).
“If the uploading of documents had been completed by February 14 along with the hearing sessions, then the electoral officers could have focused solely on scrutinizing the documents, and in that case, the possibility of extending the deadline would not have arisen,” said the insider from the CEO’s office.
Meanwhile, as the parallel scrutiny of already-uploaded documents progresses, the number of voters eligible for exclusion in the final voter list due to submitting fake or “unlisted” identity documents is also increasing. On Tuesday, approximately 35,000 such voters were identified as submitting fake or “unlisted” identity documents.
According to the current schedule, the final voter list in West Bengal is to be published on February 28. On March 1, a full bench of the ECI will be on a two-day visit to the state to assess the post-SIR situation. Shortly thereafter, the ECI will announce the polling dates for the Assembly election in the state.
