Voters queue up in courts for affidavits to fix electoral roll name mismatches
Times of India | 1 February 2026
Kolkata: Thousands of people who were asked to report for hearings by the Election Commission for logical discrepancies in SIR forms they filled in earlier made a beeline for the courts to get corrections made through affidavits. Most of them required their name spellings to be corrected.
At the Alipore court, about 1,000 people were visiting each day for affidavits, said advocate Subhajit Samanta. He said voters who wanted to retain their names in the electoral rolls filed affidavits even for minor spelling mistakes, as they were panic-stricken due to the illogical act of the EC.
The EC spotted around 1.2 crore voters in the logical discrepancies category. Around 80 lakh people had name mismatches, an official said.
The queue at the Alipore court often spiralled out of the court building. Voters waiting for their turn to file affidavits felt they were unnecessarily harassed. Asraf Ali Mollah, a visually challenged person, was at the Alipore court on Thursday for his affidavit. "I came all the way from Bhangar. I reached the court at 10 am and waited until 2 pm for the affidavit. My name had a minor mismatch with my father's, as his spelling is Akram Mollah and my name is spelt as Molla, so I was asked to file the affidavit by the BLO."
For Draupadi Giri of Behala, it took two days to complete the process of getting an affidavit issued. "My father's name is Nando Nayek, but in my EPIC it is Nandolal Nayek, so I filed the affidavit. I went on Thursday and found a long queue. After waiting for over an hour, I decided to return as my two-year-old son was with me. My lawyer advised me to come without my son the following day, and he assured me he completed the formalities. Still, I waited for two hours in the queue on Friday," she recounted.
A senior official said ideally, many of the affidavits could have been avoided if the BLOs asked voters to be more careful while filling in the forms. There were also some errors that crept in while filling in the data. TOI earlier reported how interchangeable surnames in Bengal, like Mukherjee and Mukhopadhyay, Banerjee and Bandyopadhyay, Chatterjee and Chattopadhyay, and Ganguly and Gangopadhyay, led to hearing notices and forced many to rush to get affidavits made to declare that they were one and the same person.
"Even a senior bureaucrat whose surname was Roy Choudhury in the SIR 2002 wrote Roychoudhury in the enumeration form, for which he filed an affidavit" an official pointed out.