20-yr-old legacy issue of duplicate EPICs resolved, says EC
Times of India | 14 May 2025
Kolkata: The Election Commission, in a statement on Tuesday, said it had resolved a legacy issue since 2005 of multiple people based in different states having the same EPIC number.Those with such cards were issued fresh ones with new numbers, the poll panel said.This issue was publicly flagged by CM Mamata Banerjee and Trinamool Congress to the EC, citing multiple cases in Bengal where people from Haryana, Rajasthan and even Gujarat shared the same EPIC numbers as Bengal voters.The EC, in a press release, said: "In its effort to sanitise the electoral rolls and keep them updated, EC resolved a nearly 20-year-old legacy issue of similar EPIC numbers, which were erroneously issued to genuine electors just because similar series were used by different EROs in such cases since 2005. To resolve this long-pending problem, the entire electoral database of over 99 crore electors was searched by CEOs of all the 36 states/UTs and EROs of all the 4,123 assembly constituencies across India in all the 10.5 lakh polling stations. On an average, there are about 1,000 electors per polling station. The number of similar EPIC numbers found was minuscule, averaging around one in four polling stations."The commission said that "during field-level verification, it was found that holders of such similar EPIC numbers were genuine electors in different assembly constituencies and different polling stations". All such electors have since been issued new EPIC cards with new numbers, it added."The genesis of the issue was traced back to 2005 when various states/UTs were using assembly constituency-wise different alphanumeric series in a decentralised manner. These series had to be changed again in 2008 after delimitation of constituencies. During this period, some ACs erroneously continued to use either the old series or, because of typographic errors, they used the series allotted to some other constituencies," the poll panel said.The EC, however, denied allegations that this could have led to electoral malpractices. "Every voter's name is in the electoral roll of the polling station where he/she is an ordinary resident. Having an EPIC of a similar number never enabled any such person to vote at any other polling station. Thus, the issue of a similar EPIC could not have impacted the results of any elections," it said.