Dear ECI, congratulations on finding my zero-year-old father

When a system flags nearly two million people under one category, the question cannot simply be whether each individual citizen can prove themselves innocent of the discrepancy. It must also be whether the mechanism generating the discrepancy is sufficiently transparent and reliable.

In Short

• Over 19 lakh voters flagged for 'Logical Discrepancies' in Delhi SIR process
• Discrepancy caused by father's age recorded as zero in Delhi's electoral rolls
• Records show father's age as 45 in 2002 and 69 in 2026 West Bengal rolls

There is something wonderfully Kafkaesque about receiving a notice from the Election Commission asking to explain how you could possibly be less than 15 years younger than your father, only to discover that the reason the system thinks so is because, somewhere in its database, your father has been turned into a zero-year-old.

Except, in my case, I discovered the absurdity before the notice arrived. While going through the list of electors for whom notices had been generated, I found my own name flagged for a “logical discrepancy” on the ground that the age difference between me and my parent was less than 15 years. I went to my Booth Level Officer to understand what, exactly, I had got wrong.

The answer was more revealing than the notice itself: according to the BLO, the system had generated the discrepancy because my father’s age was showing as zero against his 2002 electoral-roll record. I have a screenshot of that communication.

When I questioned how a man could possibly have been recorded as zero years old in 2002, I was told there must be an error in the document. The document, however, had not been checked.

So I checked it myself.

The 2002 SIR electoral roll records my father’s age as 45. This is the very historical electoral record being used as a reference point for the present exercise. The Election Commission itself hosts the 2002/03 SIR data on its voter portal. (wbceo.wb.gov.in)

But there is another layer to this that makes the zero even harder to understand.

West Bengal has just completed its own SIR process, with the final roll published on February 28, 2026. In that electoral revision, my father’s age is recorded as 69.

So we have three data points: 46 in the 2002 SIR record, 69 in the recently completed 2026 West Bengal SIR, and zero in the data apparently being used to generate my Delhi notice.

How does zero enter the system? That is the question I have not received an answer to.

If there was an error in the old electoral data, one would expect a subsequent SIR exercise to be precisely where such an error could be identified and corrected. If the recently completed Bengal SIR records my father as 69, then how does the Election Commission’s system, while undertaking another intensive revision, arrive at zero when linking the same electoral history?

And if the answer is simply that the data being used in Delhi is different, we should be told the source of this newly found data.

Instead, the citizen is left with the phrase “logical discrepancy”, a phrase that sounds reassuringly scientific until you discover that the logic behind your discrepancy begins with a 45-year-old man in 2002 SIR being turned into zero.

This would be an amusing bureaucratic anecdote if it concerned a handful of records. It is not.

Delhi’s SIR has flagged 19,33,134 electors for “Logical Discrepancies” and another 13,79,785 as “No Mapping” with the previous SIR roll. The Delhi CEO has said 31,63,930 notices had been generated by September 19. The Election Commission is entitled, indeed required, to scrutinise electoral rolls. But scale changes the nature of an administrative error. When a system flags nearly two million people under one category, the question cannot simply be whether each individual citizen can prove themselves innocent of the discrepancy. It must also be whether the mechanism generating the discrepancy is sufficiently transparent and reliable.

That question is already before the Supreme Court. A petition has challenged the lack of clarity around what precisely constitutes a “Logical Discrepancy” and sought disclosure of the criteria and methodology by which voters are placed in that category.

The ECI has pointed out that automated checks can flag genuine family circumstances, unusual age gaps, closely spaced births and other relationships that may look anomalous to software but are perfectly legitimate. That is a reasonable explanation for why an automated system needs human verification.

But my case is different.

The machine did not misunderstand an unusual family circumstance. It appears to have started with the wrong number. And that distinction matters.

A citizen can be asked to explain an unusual fact. But should a citizen have to explain an unusual fact that exists because the state’s own database has apparently changed the underlying fact?

This is where the SIR exercise runs into a basic question of administrative accountability. The state is asking citizens to trust the accuracy of a system while simultaneously asking them to correct that system when it produces an error. The burden of verification is then transferred from the institution that owns the database to the individual whose name happens to be sitting inside it.

For someone with time, access to records and the ability to chase a BLO, that may mean an irritating few hours. For an ordinary voter who cannot easily locate a 2002 electoral roll, take time off work or navigate an electoral office, the same “logical discrepancy” can carry a very different cost.

This is why the growing list of prominent people receiving notices should not be the real story. Chief Minister Rekha Gupta, for example, was flagged over an age-related discrepancy and subsequently had her electoral entry validated. Arvind Kejriwal and members of his family have also appeared among those whose records were flagged. The list gets even more striking: a serving CBI Director, a former Army General, judges, politicians and other public figures have all found themselves caught in the sweep.

The more important question is what happens to everyone who does not have the visibility to get an erroneous entry quickly examined.

A constitutional body conducting an exercise of this magnitude cannot answer questions of data integrity with bureaucratic circularity. “The system flagged it, therefore you must explain it” is not an adequate answer when the citizen is asking why the system contains the wrong information in the first place.

The ECI should be able to tell a voter what record generated the flag, what field produced the discrepancy, how that field was populated and what verification was undertaken before the notice was issued. If the underlying record is wrong, the correction should not depend upon how persistent, connected or resourceful the citizen happens to be.

There is also a public-money question here. Every notice requires administrative time; every hearing requires an officer; every unnecessary verification consumes state resources and citizen time. When the number of flags runs into lakhs, these are no longer isolated glitches. They become a question of whether the system is designed to minimise false positives or simply process them at scale.

The Election Commission has every right to verify voters. It must also be accountable for the machinery doing the verification.

In my case, the question is remarkably simple.

In 2002, my father was 45. In the SIR completed in West Bengal this year, he is 69. How, then, did he become zero in the electoral data used to generate my discrepancy in Delhi?

I have been asked to explain the logical discrepancy.

Perhaps the Election Commission should first explain the arithmetic.

Because if a constitutional body cannot tell a citizen how 45 became zero, asking that citizen to prove that the resulting discrepancy is not his fault is not verification.

It is the database outsourcing its own homework to the voter.

(The author is an Associate Editor with India Today TV, where she covers national affairs.)

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