Another ‘Corrupt’ SIR: After Uttar Pradesh Name Shame, Bangaluru Electoral Voter Lists Reveal Over 1000 Corrupted Entries
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Summarized by AI; it may make mistakes. Check important info
Bengaluru’s final electoral rolls released after the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) are severely corrupted with garbled font codes, missing identity records, and bizarre dummy entries, intensifying widespread street protests led by civil society groups against the Election Commission of India.
Transliteration Software Failures
An investigation into Bengaluru’s published final voter lists revealed over 1,000 corrupted entries across multiple Assembly constituencies, rendering hundreds of voters unidentifiable. In Dasarahalli Assembly constituency’s polling part number 324, which contains 425 electors, consecutive blocks of entries contain unreadable strings of diacritical symbols.
At serial number 327 in Dasarahalli, an elector’s name reads "µ¢µÌèÌ" while the relative’s name appears as "Ï¢µÈèÈ". Identical garbled character strings repeat across serial numbers 4 to 7, 143 to 150, 152 to 157, 300 to 302, 306 to 313, 327 to 330, and 336 to 340.
A polling official attributed the breakdown to transliteration software errors during automated script conversion. Legacy fonts used for Kannada character encoding failed to convert into standard digital formats, collapsing names into gibberish when processed by the central server.
Email Addresses and Dates Infiltrate Electoral Records
Beyond font corruption, personal email handles, dates of birth, and identity numbers were wrongly inserted into primary name columns. In Yelahanka Assembly constituency’s polling part number 332, a relative’s name is recorded as "rakshithagowda1430@gmail.comgowda".
In BBMP South district, an entry records a relative's name as "Syed Apsar KZW1566785", merging an EPIC card number directly into the name field. Elsewhere, a 50-year-old male voter has his date of birth embedded in his name column as "Channapa Gowda Patil 01/06/1974", while a 44-year-old female elector is listed as "??????K".
Single-letter labels like "S" or "B" replace relative names in Mahadevapura, while fields in Chamarajpet record relationship categories such as "Wife" or "Husband" instead of actual names. In Dasarahalli's polling part number 7, an elector named Kavitha has her name split between English and Kannada script, with her relative listed as "Husband Husband".
Echoes of UP Electoral Roll Controversy Trigger Mass Demonstrations
The structural degradation of Bengaluru's voter lists marks the second major multi-state failure of the ECI's automated revision tools, following massive electoral roll anomalies in Uttar Pradesh. During recent legislative updates in UP, automated translation errors transformed elector names into absurd strings such as "Ram Ne Yadav Ko Mara" for voter Ramhit Yadav, alongside entries listing "B.Com" under father's name fields across 158 constituencies.
The systemic glitches have fuelled growing political outrage across Karnataka. Actor-activist Prakash Raj, alongside actor Kishore and prominent civic organisations, led an "Election Commission Chalo" march at Freedom Park in Bengaluru, demanding the immediate scrapping of the SIR process.
Protesters argue that the combination of corrupted data entry and arbitrary voter classification under the SIR exercise risks disenfranchising lakhs of legitimate citizens.
Officials Point to Form 8 Amid Rising Scrutiny
Assistant Electoral Registration Officers (AEROs) and Booth Level Officer (BLO) supervisors stated they were previously unaware of the specific corrupted entries and promised investigations. BLOs confirmed reporting recurring software glitches during data entry but were assured by IT teams that final database syncs would repair the damaged fields.
Voters who submitted accurate paper forms only discovered the unreadable data after cross-referencing published lists by house numbers. Polling authorities are advising affected electors to submit Form 8 for corrections, but activists insist that administrative errors caused by faulty ECI software should be rectified systemically rather than placing the burden of correction on ordinary citizens.
