The Uttar Pradesh electoral machinery is facing one of its sharpest credibility tests in recent years after the state's election authorities ordered criminal legal action against two senior poll officers and dismissed a computer assistant over irregularities found in 10,470 voter entries in the Pilibhit Assembly constituency. The action was announced on Thursday, following a detailed inquiry ordered by the office of the Chief Electoral Officer of Uttar Pradesh.
According to a statement issued by the office of Chief Electoral Officer Navdeep Rinwa in Lucknow, the inquiry found that a computer assistant posted at the Voter Registration Centre had entered 13,779 Form-8 applications — the statutory requests for changes in voter details — between May 31 and August 29, 2026. Of these entries, 10,470 were approved and 3,309 were rejected.
The most damaging finding, however, was procedural: not a single application form, supporting document or record connected to any of the 13,779 entries could be found anywhere in the office.
The investigation report, submitted by the District Election Officer of Pilibhit, broke the entries down further. A total of 4,717 Form-8 entries were made up to July 16, 2026, while the remaining 9,062 were entered between July 17 and August 29. These two windows correspond to the tenures of the two Electoral Registration Officers (EROs) who held charge of the constituency, and both officers have now been held responsible for the irregularities.
The authorities have directed legal action under Section 32 of the Representation of the People Act, 1950, and relevant provisions of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita against the computer assistant and the two EROs. Departmental proceedings have also been ordered against both officers, and the role of the assistant electoral registration officers who worked under them is being examined.
In Pilibhit, District Magistrate Alok Kumar told reporters on Thursday evening that departmental inquiries had been initiated against Sub-Divisional Magistrates Mayank Goswami of Puranpur and Hemant Chaudhary of Amariya, following a preliminary investigation into the matter. The two officers, who were responsible for preparing the voter list during the period under scrutiny, have been removed from their posts and attached to the district headquarters.
An FIR has been registered against both SDMs and the computer operator. The operator, identified as Anil Kumar, has been dismissed from service.
The controversy began with complaints from voters that their Electors Photo Identity Card (EPIC) numbers were displaying the personal details of entirely different people. On Wednesday, the Uttar Pradesh Congress alleged large-scale manipulation of the rolls in the Pilibhit Sadar constituency, claiming that the names of 13,150 voters had been altered even though their EPIC numbers and serial numbers remained unchanged.
The party said identical EPIC numbers had been allotted to different voters with different names and different fathers' names. The Samajwadi Party raised similar concerns.
Acting on the complaints, CEO Rinwa first ordered the immediate removal of the constituency's Electoral Registration Officer and the Voter Registration Centre operator from all voter-list-related duties. Once the inquiry confirmed the irregularities, he directed that legal action be initiated.
To understand what went wrong, it helps to know what the forms in question are for. Form-8 is the official application used to request corrections in voter details — a misspelt name, a wrong address or age, or the shifting and transposition of names within the roll. Form-6 is the application for enrolling a new voter, and Form-7 is the mechanism for objecting to an entry or seeking its deletion.
Each of these changes is supposed to be backed by a signed application form and supporting documents, and each is supposed to be scrutinised by the Electoral Registration Officer before approval. In Pilibhit, the inquiry suggests, that entire chain of verification was bypassed.
Section 32 of the Representation of the People Act, 1950, which the authorities have invoked, punishes breach of official duty in connection with the preparation, revision or correction of electoral rolls — a provision that reflects how central accurate rolls are to the conduct of free and fair elections.
The Election Commission of India has now ordered a wider examination. All Form-6 applications for inclusion of names and Form-7 applications for deletion entered by the same computer assistant between April 10 — the date on which the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of the electoral rolls concluded — and October 21 are to be scrutinised, with the District Election Officer asked to submit a detailed report within a day.
The correction of the irregular Form-8 entries is already underway in accordance with prescribed norms, and the electoral rolls of all assembly constituencies in Pilibhit district will now be examined.
The scandal has acquired a political edge because Pilibhit Sadar is represented by state minister Sanjay Gangwar, who won the 2022 Assembly election by a margin of just 6,920 votes. The Congress has cited a figure of 3,48,937 registered electors in the constituency, and opposition leaders have argued that entries numbering in the tens of thousands cannot be written off as clerical mistakes.
Reports on the development have also noted the wider context of allegations that Form-7 applications were being used to target voters in large numbers.
This is not the only episode of its kind to surface in Uttar Pradesh this week. Separately, the state CEO's office has sought a report on bizarre entries discovered in the Legislative Council (MLC) voter list for Jhansi, where the names and fathers' names of electors appeared as odd phrases such as "Ram ne Yadav ko maara" and "Murakh Kali Devi".
The two episodes, coming within days of each other, have given the opposition fresh ammunition over the handling of electoral rolls in the state.
For the election administration, the immediate task is damage control: identifying every affected entry, correcting the rolls, and ensuring that no voter is disenfranchised — or wrongly enfranchised — when the next election comes around. The deeper question the inquiry must answer is how thousands of record-less entries passed through two successive supervisory officers without a red flag being raised, and whether similar practices existed in other districts.
Until those answers emerge, the episode stands as a reminder of an elementary truth of election management: the integrity of the voter list is the foundation on which every ballot rests.
(Reporting based on NDTV and Hindustan Times.)