The air was festive in Pranpatti village in Bihar’s Purnia district in the middle of August. A pandal and a fair had been set up to mark Bishari Puja, an annual festival dedicated to the snake goddess Bishari, who brings good health and well-being to her worshippers.

Thronging the pandal were village residents, belonging largely to two groups – the Musahar community, which is listed as a Scheduled Caste in the state, and Kushwaha, a caste grouped among Bihar’s Other Backward Classes.

But since April 2024, Pranpatti’s voter list has had names of many Muslims.

“How could this be?” asked Rajesh Kumar, one of the village’s ward members. “This village does not have a single Muslim family. Yet their names have been in our voter list.”

“These are fake voters,” he said.

With the Election Commission conducting a special intensive revision of Bihar’s electoral roll, most of these newly added names now stand deleted from Pranpatti’s draft voter list. One of the polling stations in the village, in fact, has recorded the highest deletion of voters in Bihar’s Seemanchal region – more than 45% of the registered electorate.

Seemanchal includes Bihar’s Araria, Kishanganj, Purnia and Katihar districts. In Purnia, the draft voter list prepared during the Special Intensive Revision struck off 12% of registered voters, the second highest exclusion in the state after Gopalganj district, according to the Election Commission’s data.

The large-scale deletions in Pranpatti raise many questions. How did these dubious voters enter the electoral roll? Did they influence previous elections at the booth? Why are some of them still in the draft rolls?

“It is hard to give a specific reason for why this has happened,” said Anshul Kumar, Purnia’s District Election Officer. “This booth will need an in-depth study. Duplicate voters are in voter lists almost everywhere. That’s why the special intensive revision was implemented.”

A game of additions and deletions

Pranpatti falls in the Kasba assembly constituency in Purnia district. It has three polling stations which are numbered one, two and three.

Since 2010, Kasba has elected Congress party’s Md Afaque Alam as a member of the legislative assembly. But the party has had little luck in Pranpatti village, which has overwhelmingly voted for candidates of the Bharatiya Janata Party-led National Democratic Alliance since 2019, according to Election Commission data.

In April 2024, the Election Commission put out new voter lists for the Lok Sabha elections across the country. The number of voters registered at Pranpatti’s polling station number one went up from 732 to 812 voters – an increase of 11%.

But a closer look revealed more significant changes. Eighty-five voters were deleted, and over that, 165 new voters were added – 11% deletion and 23% addition, in percentage terms.

This is a red flag because the poll panel’s ground verification checks are activated when more than two percent voters are deleted or more than four percent are added at any polling station, according to its electoral rolls manual. It is not clear if any checks were conducted – the booth level officer declined comment.

The additions and deletions for the other two booths were modest in comparison: 3% addition and 5% deletion in polling station two, and 4% addition and 3% deletion in station three.

Ward member Rajesh Kumar told Scroll that additions and deletions have been a persistent problem in polling station one. “Every year, fake voters are added to this booth,” he said. “We work with the booth level officer to get them deleted, yet new fake voters are added simultaneously.”

One of the ways to identify fake voters, Kumar went on, was to spot Muslim names in the voter list. Since there are no Muslim families in the village, it was not possible for the booth to have Muslim voters, he said.

The voter list from April 2024 bears this out. Of the 85 deleted voters, 25 had Muslim names. But in the same list, of the 165 names added, 40 of them were Muslim.

There was a bizarre instance among the deletions. One woman named “Shabi Ara” showed up in three entries in the voter list. Her age, house number and the name of her husband were the same, but she had three different EPIC numbers.

Like it does at the start of every year, in January 2025, the Election Commission published an updated voter list. In polling station one in Pranpatti, seven voters were deleted – just one of them was Muslim. But 10 new voters were added and seven of them had Muslim names.

A continuous revision throughout the year brought a fresh wave of new voters to the polling station. Between January 7 and June 24 this year, 273 voters were added, 110 of them were Muslim. With this, the total number of new voters added to the booth since April 2024 rose to 359.

A senior election official in Purnia told Scroll that voter lists are often spiked in the run up to panchayat elections. “Voters from neighbouring villages are added to the rolls for a candidate’s benefit,” said the official. But panchayat polls were last held in Pranpatti in 2022, according to ward member Kumar.

Pranpatti resident Nirmal Kumar Singh, 63, blamed the MLA for the presence of fake voters on the voter list. “Before Afaque Alam was the MLA here, we did not have a single fake voter in our voter list,” said Singh. “This has only happened at his behest in recent years.” Kumar agreed with this view.

Questions sent to the MLA over text and email went unanswered. He did not respond to our phone calls. The story will be updated if there is a response.

Enter SIR

The Election Commission began a special intensive revision of voter lists on June 24. Voters were asked to submit an enumeration form to booth level officers before July 26.

Those who failed to submit this form were excluded for four reasons: either they had died, shifted permanently, enrolled in multiple places, or were absent.

The draft roll was published on August 1. Across the state, 65 lakh voters were excluded from the roll. On August 17, the Election Commission released the list of their names, along with the reasons for their exclusion.

In Pranpatti’s polling station number one, 499 voters were deleted from the roll. The Election Commission’s official list states that 28 had died, 105 had shifted permanently, 15 were found to be enrolled in multiple places, and 351 voters were absent.

Kumar claims that these 351 absent voters were fake and the SIR rightfully deleted almost all of them, though some remain. “Twelve voters who do not live in this village are still included in the new voter list,” he said, pointing to 12 Muslim names.

Scroll went through the draft voter list and found nine voters with Muslim names.

Did the fake voters vote?

If there were several fake voters in Pranpatti’s electoral roll since April 2024, were votes cast in their name during the last Lok Sabha elections?

Chandrakishore Mehta, the polling agent in Pranpatti of the Bharatiya Janata Party-led National Democratic Alliance, said he did not observe anything abnormal at the polling centre during the polls. “Most of those who voted then were people who live here,” said Mehta. “There were no outsiders.”

The village’s voter turnout data released by the Election Commission does not show any odd increase over the years. The turnout in the last two Lok Sabha polls broadly remained the same.

According to official Election Comission data, 424 voters had cast their votes at this booth last year. Mehta had a marked voter list showing tick marks before the names of 398 voters who had voted in the Lok Sabha elections.

Scroll compared the marked list with the list of excluded voters in Special Intensive Revision draft roll. We found that 26 of the 499 deleted voters at polling station one had cast votes during the Lok Sabha polls.

In the Election Commission’s list of exclusions, 12 of them have been labelled as “permanently shifted”, ten as “dead” and four as having enrolled in multiple places.

This means that none of the 351 “absent” voters – whom locals allege are fake voters – had voted in the Lok Sabha elections, deepening the mystery over why had they been added to the electoral roll.

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