The Election Commission of India (ECI) will soon use AI-based software to identify duplicate voters during the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls in 12 states.

West Bengal Chief Electoral Officer (CEO) Manoj Agarwal said the software will use face recognition to match photographs and flag duplicate entries.

“The AI-based software, through the face recognition feature, will identify the voters who are duplicates,” he said.

Agarwal said he hopes the SIR-related work in Bengal, including distributing, collectin,g and digitising enumeration forms (EFs), will be finished by November 25–26 before the draft rolls are published.

Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) Gyanesh Kumar held a video meeting with CEOs from all 12 states to check the progress of the revision drive.

Agarwal said the CEC has clearly told officials that the person who signs any form will be responsible for giving correct information.

This includes reporting if a voter has died, moved away, or if the person’s name appears more than once.

The West Bengal CEO’s office said in a statement: “Correct information in regard to dead voter, permanently shifted voter, or voter whose name is entered elsewhere in addition to the present part, that is, duplicate voter, is to be given to the BLOs by the applicant or the signatories who are signing on behalf of the applicant.”

Bengal has completed digitising 73.19 lakh EFs, which is 9.55% of the total.

The state has already distributed 99.56%, or 7.63 crore forms, and the distribution process is almost over.

Booth Level Officers (BLOs) can now take photographs during house visits and upload them through the BLO app if they face any issues while scanning pictures.

Officials also clarified that neither the ECI nor the West Bengal CEO’s office ever asks for an OTP for any work linked to SIR or voter list revision.

ECI team to visit Bengal for review

A high-level ECI team led by Deputy Election Commissioner Gyanesh Bharti will begin a field review of the SIR process in Bengal from Tuesday.

The team will meet District Election Officers, District Magistrates, ADM (Election), OC-Election, EROs and Supervising Officers to check the progress in Kolkata North, Kolkata South and South 24 Parganas.

They will hold similar meetings in Nadia and Murshidabad on November 19 and in Malda on November 20.

After three days of reviews and field visits, the team will attend a workshop on EVM First-Level Checking (FLC) on November 21.