EC tells Supreme Court 22 lakh deleted West Bengal voters have appealed

The Election Commission has told the Supreme Court that more than 22 lakh electors deleted from West Bengal's rolls during the Special Intensive Revision have challenged their exclusion, according to a reply filed in response to an application by TMC MP Derek O'Brien.

Of the 38.31 lakh appeals pending before appellate tribunals, 22.21 lakh were filed by deleted voters seeking inclusion, while 16.10 lakh were filed against voters who had been included, seeking their further deletion. The deleted-voter appeals amount to roughly 82% of the 27.16 lakh names removed through the adjudication process.

The Commission did not specify who filed the deletion requests. Under the rules, any elector or electoral official may file a form seeking the removal of someone suspected to be ineligible.

To clear the backlog, the poll body proposed increasing the number of appellate tribunals in the state to match the number of parliamentary constituencies, saying this would help dispose of pending appeals faster.

The revision followed a Supreme Court order on February 20 directing that the eligibility of certain West Bengal electors be adjudicated by judicial officers, after the court noted a trust deficit between the then-TMC government and the Commission. About 700 judicial officers from West Bengal, Jharkhand and Odisha were asked to examine 60.06 lakh electors flagged by the Commission's "logical discrepancies" algorithm. They ordered the deletion of 27.16 lakh names and retained the rest.

On March 10, the court directed that appellate tribunals be set up to hear appeals against those decisions. Nineteen tribunals began functioning on April 13, shortly before the West Bengal Assembly polls on April 23 and April 29. Only 1,607 electors were added back in time for polling, leaving the remaining appellants unable to vote in the 2026 elections.