UP chief electoral officer orders removal of duplicate voter IDs from rolls

Uttar Pradesh's chief electoral officer has instructed district officials to remove duplicate voter identification entries from electoral rolls, acknowledging that the system can generate repeated registrations for the same individual.

The CEO said de-duplication exercises are conducted periodically through the ECINET platform, and that work is under way to catch repeated applications at the point of submission rather than after they enter the rolls.

The intervention comes as the Election Commission of India reversed its earlier position on making electoral rolls searchable, having previously resisted the move on misuse grounds. Senior commission officials have since said that withholding voters' photographs from any searchable database remains the sole safeguard against the concerns it had originally raised.

The move to clean up voter rolls in India's most populous state is likely to draw scrutiny over the integrity of electoral data, with critics questioning whether the existing periodic de-duplication process is sufficiently robust to prevent fraudulent or accidental duplicate registrations.