Concerns over deadline to verify out-of-state certs
Times of India | 11 January 2026
Kolkata: The complex process of document verification after the SIR hearing is posing a challenge to complete the exercise within the timeline, a section of Election Commission (EC) officials said. The commission mandated verification of documents within five working days, which officials said was extremely difficult for applicants whose documents were issued in other states or union territories.
Several electors were unmapped in the EC's software due to sporadic errors in conversion of the PDF of the 2002 SIR list. These voters, marked as unmapped in the EC's software, were mapped to the hard copy of the 2002 SIR list in other states, but those details were not available to them. A BLO in south Kolkata said: "For those mapped to the hard copy of the 2002 SIR list, the EC sought details from the voters like part number, serial number, and booth in other states. But they returned to the city after retirement and are unable to give their 23-year-old voting details."
Santoshpur resident Swapan Boral, a civil engineer, lived in Pune for 25 years and returned to the city in 2006. "I shifted my voter's card but I don't have the voting details with me now. I am unsure whether my name will be retained on the final list," he said.
"If an applicant's document is issued in the same district of his/her residence constituency, then the verification is not a problem. However, if the district is different, the process is complex," an EC official said.
"The issue was raised by several DEOs in a meeting with the EC's IT team and the Bengal CEO held last week. The DEOs also said that they couldn't track thousands of such mails every day. However, the EC could not provide a clear solution to this issue," a source said.