At least 47 lakh voters in Bihar were excluded from the final electoral roll published by the Election Commission on Tuesday after it conducted a special intensive revision of the list.

Concerns had been raised that the revision process could disenfranchise many voters.

The list is available on the poll panel’s website, where voters can either search for their names or download Assembly segment-wise rolls.

This came ahead of Assembly elections expected to be held in October or November.

The revision of the electoral rolls in Bihar was announced by the Election Commission on June 24.

As part of the exercise, persons whose names were not on the 2003 voter list needed to submit proof of eligibility to vote.

The draft rolls were published on August 1 and kept open for “claims and objections” by individuals and political parties until September 1.

As many as 7.2 crore electors were listed in the draft rolls, while 65.6 lakh names were removed from it.

Of these, 22 lakh were due to deaths, 36 lakh were of persons who had permanently shifted or were untraceable and seven lakh were duplicate entries, the Election Commission had said at the time.

Several petitioners had moved the Supreme Court against the exercise. Earlier this month, the court directed the Election Commission to accept Aadhaar cards as a valid identity proof for the ongoing special intensive revision.

The Aadhaar card was not among the 11 documents that the poll panel had said could be submitted as proof of citizenship. Several petitioners had objected to the exclusion of Aadhaar, the most widely held ID, from the list of permissible documents, calling it “absurd”.

The court had earlier said that the entire exercise could be set aside if it was found to be illegal.

The next hearing in the matter is scheduled on October 7.

The Election Commission has defended the voter roll revision as a clean-up exercise to remove names of the deceased, duplicate entries and undocumented migrants ahead of the elections.

A Scroll analysis of the data published by the Election Commission on August 1 showed that women made up 55% of voters who were excluded from Bihar’s draft voter list after the revision.

It also showed that five of the state’s 10 districts with the largest share of Muslim population had the highest number of excluded voters.

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