Many complaints continue to appear from voters on their names missing from voter lists, as the first day of India’s seven-phase general election kicked off on Thursday, with constituencies across 20 states going to the polls. The missing voters - especially those in Hyderabad - recalled the assembly elections in Telangana last December, where lakhs of citizens were denied their right to vote as their names had been deleted from voter lists. Missing voters: A regular occurrence A month before the Telangana polls, Srinivas Kodali, a data scientist and researcher from Hyderabad, had filed a public interest litigation against the Election Commission of India (ECI), alleging that the names of 27 lakh voters in Telangana and 19 lakh in Andhra Pradesh were deleted using software and without following required procedure, under the National Electoral Roll Purification and Authentication Programme (NERPAP) in 2015. Kodali told MediaNama on Friday it was “quite likely” that many names that were missing from voter lists on Thursday had vanished in similar ways, and blamed the mess on the ECI's "increasing use of technology to weed out duplicate voters". “We don’t know how many names were deleted when the EC started linking people’s voter IDs with Aadhaar in 2015. Large numbers were deleted in Telangana and Andhra Pradesh, but other places may have been affected too,” he said. He said the ECI had not notified citizens in Telangana that their personal data was being used, as they were required to, and seem to have failed to do…
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