BJP won Meerut with thin margin. Its 2 booths have 27% fake voters

This is the third part of our investigation into discrepancies in voter lists. Read all of them here.

Do you see a complete address when you look at your voter ID card? If you are in Meerut, you probably won’t.

Unless you believe “Uttar Pradesh” is an address. Or “jhuggi”. Or “naya”. Empty columns or words like these were the addresses of 86 voters in the voter lists of booth 305 of the Meerut Cantonment assembly, which falls under the Meerut Lok Sabha seat. In the same booth, around 240 voters are registered with RHA Colony as their address. The colony does not exist.

In Meerut, a total of 61,365 voters were deleted and over 1 lakh added to the voter lists before the BJP’s Arun Govil defeated the Samajwadi Party’s Sunita Verma with a margin of over 10,000 votes. But Newslaundry found odd trends when we scanned 2,042 booths across the constituency. 

For example, in just two booths, there were 336 fake voters.

These two booths were among the three – 286, 304 and 305 – which were picked for door-to-door surveys by Newslaundry. They were chosen as per our methodology – because they saw the highest deletion rate this year and were part of Meerut Cantonment, an assembly segment which saw the highest deletion rate across Meerut’s five assembly seats. But despite such high rates of deletions, fake voters remained in the voter lists.

Meerut Cantonment, where 30 percent of the voters are SC or Muslim, saw a deletion percentage of 3.8 percent (16,521 voters). It was followed by Hapur, where SC and Muslims form 50 percent of total voters and which saw its voter roll shrink by 3.2 percent (12,023 voters). Elsewhere in Meerut, the deletion rate was below 3 percent. 

Our small sample size found large gaps, though it is for the Election Commission to hold an inquiry to find bogus voters in the entire Lok Sabha seat.

‘Where do I find these voters?’

Every year, the Election Commission of India cleans up voter rolls by removing and adding new voters. There are several reasons to do so, such as voters who are removed for shifting their residence, or voters who are added once they’re legally old enough to vote. 

But there are many holes in this clean-up exercise in Meerut, as per our findings from localities under three booths and conversations with the electoral registration officer and booth-level officers (BLOs), who play the most crucial role on the ground in roll revisions.

To the Election Commission’s credit, the three booths we surveyed and which had over 2,800 voters saw the removal of 1,348 voters ahead of the Lok Sabha elections this year. Of these 1,348, at least 700 had non-existent addresses (more on the remaining voters later in this report). So before the clean-up exercise, 25 percent of voters in the three booths were fake.

Despite the clean-up, two of these three booths still had at least 336 voters with false addresses among the total 1,217 names. That makes up for 27 percent of the cleaned-up voter list in those two while we found no false addresses in the third booth.

These 336 voters include 240 with various house numbers within the non-existent RHA Colony, and 96 with vague address entries like “naya”.

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When this reporter visited the official post service’s head office in the heart of Meerut Cantonment to cross-check findings, officials pointed to a tall postman who was sitting in a corner with a pile of letters. “He knows the area in and out. Because he has been doing the same job for over a decade,” they said about Vikas Chaudhary.

Quick to offer help, Chaudhary sifted through the voter lists of the three booths, and chuckled. “You are right. The RHA colony does not exist…bogus voters have become a big problem across Meerut. A couple of months back, I was tasked with distributing new voter cards sent by the EC but had to dump thousands of them at the local election office as I could not find their addresses.”

Voters can be added to electoral rolls through applications such as form 6 or form 8. These require documentary proof of name, age, date of birth and address. They are signed by electoral registration officers with remarks from field officers such as BLOs. No documentary evidence is needed only for the category of homeless voters. Furnishing false information by a voter is a punishable offence under Representation of People Act.

Asked about the presence of fake voters, Rashmi Kumari, a sub-divisional magistrate deputed as the Electoral Registration Officer for Meerut Cantonment in August after the Lok Sabha polls, said she will look into these booths after discussions with BLOs concerned. “These votes should have been deleted. Because they can be easily used for bogus voting on the polling day. What’s the point of keeping them in the voter list when their addresses are not marked?”

When Newslaundry showed voters with these addresses to Navdeep Rinwa, Chief Electoral Officer of UP, he said, “There is no clear SOP by the Election Commission of India to delete such voters. If a voter’s full address is not entered at the time of registration, it becomes a huge problem at the time of deletion. Because how will the BLOs conduct their house-to-house verification and where will we send notices informing them about deletion of their vote? And such voters with incomplete addresses is a widespread problem in urban areas and is not just limited to Meerut. So we will request the Election Commission of India to get it fixed.”

Mayank Tomar, BLO at booth 305, said, “Where am I supposed to find these voters? In my eight years at these two booths, I have never been able to trace them.” Poonam Aggarwal, BLO at booth 304, had similar concerns.

The BLOs of all three booths claimed that every year they would request the deletion of fake voters on these booths but the district administration would deny their requests. 

Vishal Chaudhary, BLO at booth 286, claimed, “We had requested the district administration to delete these voters in the past as well. But the district administration would never allow us.” Other BLOs agreed. 

How did they make it to the list?

Poonam Aggarwal, BLO at booth 304 for over a decade, explained how these voters were added in the first place. She alleged that district officials, who were part of the poll machinery and senior to her, had ordered her to sign form 6, a mandatory application to register new voters, in bulk before the 2014 Lok Sabha elections. “I remember signing 1,800 forms within a couple of days. Then, these new voters were distributed across the polling stations. Whenever we sign form 6 for a new voter, we do a proper verification before registering them. But for these voters, no such thing was done. Random people would walk into my house at 8 pm to get hundreds of these forms signed and we had to abide by it.” When asked, the BLO could not identify who these “random people” were. 

Aggarwal claimed she had no choice. “How could I have said no to the orders by the administration? That would have put me into trouble. And this has happened only once since 2014.”

BLO Tomar and BLO Chaudhary claimed they were told the same about booths 286 and 305 by their predecessors. 

A total of 1,348 voters were deleted from these three booths. Booth 286 saw the highest rate of deletion – 87 percent – with 711 out of 817 voters struck off the list. Booth 304 had a deletion rate of 60 percent and booth 305 saw a deletion rate of 26 percent. 

BLO Tomar said, “Had they given permission to delete more voters from these booths then maybe the entire booth would have been deleted.” He also pointed to an abnormal gender ratio in some cases. For example, in booth 286, house number 22 in Shivaji Colony was shared by 48 voters, of whom one was a woman. “Aisa koi ghar hota hai kya (can there be a home like this)?”

House number 25/5 was shared by 44 voters, and house number 25 was shared by 46, according to the voter list. All these have now been deleted.

Similarly, 105 voters from booth 305 share house number 9 in “RHA Colony”, according to the list. Eighty-nine of them are men and 16 are women. Of these, 42 have been deleted. BLO Tomar said the remaining should also be deleted because he has not found them in his surveys. 

At booth 305, in RA Bazaar, BLO Aggarwal pointed out other strange instances, such as 36 voters residing in house number 54 in RA Bazaar and 23 voters in house number 49 in RA Bazaar, with no woman voter in both cases. All of these were among those who were deleted.

ERO Kumari explained the presence of bogus voters despite the strike-offs. “The remaining non-traceable voters were not deleted because this time the administration had already removed a huge chunk of them. And the former ERO did not want to delete all names so that’s why the remaining were spared from deletions.”

The army voters

Of the 1,348 deletions in the three booths, 600 were from army areas such as SRC Line, Chandigarh Line and RA Line. The rest were from residential localities such as Shivaji Colony, Jhuggi Thopkhana and RA Bazaar, including nearly 700 fake voters and about 100 who had shifted residence or had died. 

Before the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, the Supreme Court directed the Election Commission to allow defence personnel to vote as general voters in peace stations. So army voters can enroll as general voters if they like. 

We asked UP Chief Electoral Officer Navdeep Rinwa why these voters were added in the first place and not deleted later. He explained, “In a cantonment area, there is a tendency that when the troops move in, they get themselves registered as a voter. Later nobody puts in efforts to delete them. But this time, we took action to get them deleted. I specifically told the district election officers that the voter turnout data of the booths in the cantonment area shows that in reality these voters do not live here so they have to conduct the house-to-house survey in real and not just on paper.”

However, Meerut district election officer Ved Pal Singh claimed that army officers usually vote only through postal ballots. “Army voters vote through postal ballots unless or until they start living here permanently. BLOs do not indulge in registering army voters because they are not even allowed to enter those areas.”

The BLOs on these three booths also said that they have never registered army voters. 

To this, UP CEO Rinwa responded, “I was not [the UP CEO] in 2014. But I have learnt during that year there was some movement conducted at that time to increase army voters. But for a long time these voters were not deleted, so this time we got them deleted. And in my review I had specifically mentioned that the polling is really low in cantonment areas so it needs special attention and people will have to go and do proper surveys.”

Asked why there were no additions to the list this time if army movement triggers roll revisions, Rinwa said the poll panel did not receive applications “this time”. “If they do not (submit an application), we can’t force them to.”

The turnout and the trend

But what’s stranger is the turnout data for these three booths. Booth 304’s turnout fluctuates from 1.9 percent in 2019 Lok Sabha polls to 43 percent in 2022 UP assembly elections. Similar trends were observed in booth 286 and 305. 

Former Chief Election Commissioner SY Quraishi said a turnout spiking from 1.6 percent to 43 percent “means there is something wrong here. The EC should take notice of these kinds of booths, automatically. Because anything extraordinary has to be viewed with suspicion.” 

BLO Chaudhary of booth 286 said, “My booth had the highest turnout rate in 2014. But these voters magically disappeared after the 2014 Lok Sabha election.”

BLO Tomar from booth 305 tried to explain the fluctuating turnout. “Sometimes, I see a random person from Punjab coming to poll at my booth,” he claimed.

The Meerut Lok Sabha seat has been represented by the BJP since 2009 and the party has also won repeatedly from the Meerut Cantonment seat housing these three booths since 1993. While there has been a decline in the BJP’s victory margin, from 16 percent in 2014 to less than 1 percent in 2019 and 2024 Lok Sabha polls, the majority of the votes at these three booths have always gone to the BJP in recent years.  

In 2014 Lok Sabha elections, BJP’s Rajendra Aggarwal had defeated BSP’s Mohammad Shahid Akhlak with a margin of over 2.3 lakh votes. However, in the Meerut Cantonment assembly, Aggarwal’s winning margin was only 5,000 votes, of which 865 votes were from two of the three booths with bogus voters.

Five years later, in 2019 Lok Sabha elections, BJP’s Rajendra Aggarwal struggled to retain his seat against the BSP’s Haji Yaqoob Qureshi. Aggarwal won by just 4,729 votes. IANS had alleged ghost voters in that election, with Aggarwal pointing to a “human error” or “conspiracies by the workers”.

In the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, while BJP’s Arun Govil won with a narrow margin of 10,585, the SP’s voter share increased in Meerut Cantonment when the party fielded Jatav candidate Sunita Verma. 

Newslaundry could not ascertain whether bogus voters had exercised the right to franchise in this year’s Lok Sabha polls or previous elections. Only an EC intervention can clarify if that took place. 

With inputs from Anmol Pritam.

Coming next: Chandni Chowk Cong candidate’s neighbourhood among booths with largest strike-off rate.

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