As the people of Murshidabad district vote in the first phase of the high-stakes 2026 West Bengal Assembly elections, Akhtar Ali is discharging his duties as the Presiding Officer in one of the polling booths of Samserganj Assembly seat.
But he won't be casting a vote himself.
Ali's name has not appeared in the electoral roll following the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) mandated by the Election Commission of India (ECI).
"First my name was put under adjudication. Then, it was deleted. This, despite the face that I am a mapped voter," Ali, who's a high school teacher in Samserganj, tells The Quint.
During elections, each polling station is assigned a Presiding Officer by the District Election Officer to supervise the polling. That makes the Presiding Officer a representative of the ECI.
This is not the first time that Ali has been picked for this job. "I have been a presiding officer for two Lok Sabha elections, as well as a Panchayat poll," he says. But this is the first time that he's lost his right to vote.
Only 139 Cases Approved by Tribunal
After his name was deleted, Ali filed an online appeal at the special Appellate Tribunal, which reportedly had 30 lakh-plus applications pending before them to go through till 21 April, Tuesday, before the first phase of voting in the state on 23 April.
The wait is now over for these lakhs of voters awaiting a response from the ECI.
A day ahead of the first phase of voting, the ECI published a supplementary list of 139 voters whose appeals were approved.
Of the 139 approved in the nick of time, Ali isn't one.
One of five brothers, Ali and his younger brother, a professor at a government college, have been denied the right to vote. His three brothers as well as his parents were mapped in 2002, as per the initial requirement.
"There was an error in the spelling of my father's surname in the 2002 list. He got that corrected through Form 8, provided by the ECI for the very purpose of making corrections to errors to names or other credentials. The corrections have already been made," Ali states.
He further points out the EPIC number his father had in 2002 is the same as that on his current voter card.
Initially, Ali and his brother were put under adjudication, and then given a notice for a hearing. In that hearing, they were asked to furnish further documents.
"The ECI had said that unmapped voters need any of the 13 listed docuements, including driving licence, Madhyamik [class 10] certificate, caste certificate etc. We were asked to produce these, even though we were mapped voters. We produced three of the 13. They were not enough," Ali tells The Quint.
"The irony is that I received the letter for becoming a Presiding Officer after I was deleted from the electoral roll. It is very sad that as a public sevant conducting polls, I have been denied my right to vote."
Mass Deletions
At the end of the SIR process, a total of 91 lakh voters stand removed from the voter rolls, including the dead, the deleted, and the doubtful.
In Samserganj, Lalgola, and Bhagoangola seats in Murshidabad district, every other house has the same story. Overall, nearly 34 lakh voters were removed from the rolls ahead of the first phase and could have appealed.
Of these seven lakh appeals were against names being included in the rolls, and 27 lakh appeals were of people under adjudication, as per reports. Of the 27 lakh cases pending in the tribunals, about 17 lakh are Muslims and 10 lakh are Hindus.
While some argue that Hindu deletions, at 63 percent, outnumber Muslim deletions, Muslims only constitute 27 percent of the total state population as opposed to the 70 percent Hindus, making the deletions disproportionately high, activist Asif Farooq of Berhampore points out.
Moreover, the districts with the highest deletions—Murshidabad, Maldah, North Dinajpur—have a consolidated Muslim vote, which in the last few elections has voted solidly for the Trinamool Congress (TMC).
This has raised questions over the "targeted deletions" of voters. In Maldah, exasperation led to protests and eventual violence when those seeking answers held judicial officers overseeing the electoral process "hostage" for hours, necessitating a rescue operation in Mothabari.
"Such high deletions are unprecedented. Emotions have been running high, and as poll day neared, the heavy police and security presence has also made people wary," Farooq, the convenor of Parijayi Shramik Aikyo Mancha, a sangathan (organisation) of migrant workers, said.
In an earlier press conference, West Bengal Chief Electoral Officer Manoj Kumar Agarwal had said that the 27 lakh people, whose names have been deleted, can appeal before the tribunal for reconsideration. If their names are cleared by the tribunal, they will be included in the electoral roll and can vote again, but not in this election.
"By this logic, the SIR should have taken place much before polls," Farooq adds.
Of the total voters who had appealed in Murshidabad, Ali informs that as per his information, 63 had been restored through the 'Appellate Tribunal Supplementary List No 1'. Among them was the name of Dhuliyan Municipality chairman Md Injamul Islam alias Raja. He is the only one from Samserganj whose name was restored, among the over 74,000 persons removed.
For the thousands of voters unable to vote in this election, the future renmains uncertain and laden with even more paperwork. "Would anyone care about us once the elections are over?" Sakim Sheikh, a deleted migrant worker from Samserganj, says.