‘Election Commission stands like a rock with voters’: CEC explains duplicate EPICs process

New Delhi, Aug 17: Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) Gyanesh Kumar on Sunday explained the issue of duplicate Electors Photo Identity Cards (EPICs) and assured that the Election Commission of India (ECI) had “taken measures to protect the rights of voters” while resolving such cases.Addressing a press conference in the national capital, Gyanesh Kumar said, “Duplicate EPICs can happen in two ways. One, that a person who is in West Bengal, who is a different person, has one EPIC number, and another person who is in Haryana has the same EPIC number. When this question came up around March 2025, we discussed it and we solved it across the country. About three lakh such people were found, whose EPIC numbers were the same, so their EPIC numbers were changed.”The CEC stressed that the Commission moved carefully to avoid errors while updating the electoral rolls. “The Election Commission stands like a rock with the voters. So, if this is done in a hurry, then any voter’s name can be deleted wrongly. Someone else’s name will be deleted in your place,” Kumar asserted.The Chief Election Commissioner added that the second type of duplication occurred when the same individual’s name appeared in voter lists at more than one location, but with different EPIC numbers.He explained the historical context, saying, “That is, one person, many EPICs. Before 2003, if you wanted to get your name deleted from the old place, then there was no website of the Election Commission, which had all the data in one place. So, since technical facilities were not available before 2003, many such people who migrated to different places had their names added to many places. Then a question arose that today there is a website, there is a computer, you can select and delete it.”On August 16, ECI had flagged the time to raise issues about errors in the electoral rolls, even those in the past, was during the “Claims and Objections” period.According to the EC, the precise objective behind sharing the electoral roll with all political parties and candidates was so that any issue regarding the same can be raised on time. The Constitutional body raised the issue of political parties, and their Booth Level Agents did not examine the electoral rolls at the appropriate time.It said that the digital and physical copies are shared with recognised political parties after the publication of the final electoral roll on the EC’s website.”Recently, some political parties and individuals have raised issues about errors in the Electoral Rolls, including those prepared in the past. The appropriate time to raise any issue with the Electoral Rolls would have been during the Claims and Objections period of that phase, which is precisely the objective behind sharing the electoral rolls with all political parties and the candidates,” EC said in an official release.”Had these issues been raised at the right time through the right channels, it would have enabled the concerned SDM EROs to correct the mistakes, if genuine, before those elections,” the release read.