The mission given to election workers on the ground in the Indian state of Bihar this summer was daunting: Verify the identity of nearly 80 million eligible voters in only a few weeks.
Their work was complicated by a number of circumstances. It was harvest time and there was heavy flooding. Millions of people in Bihar, one of India’s poorest states, were on the move in search of work. There was confusion over the orders from the country’s election commission, and the election workers faced enormous pressure as the exercise became the subject of legal and political battles.
Despite the problems, the commission released on schedule a draft voter list, which cut off 6.5 million people in the state. It said that about a third of those were dead and that the rest had moved elsewhere or had their names duplicated.
But some people removed for being dead turned out to be very much alive. They were paraded in the capital, New Delhi, by India’s opposition, which used them as evidence to suggest that the verification exercise was part of a ploy by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party to influence elections.
“I have heard you are not alive?” Rahul Gandhi, the leader of the Indian National Congress, joked with half a dozen of the voters listed as deceased.
Mr. Gandhi and other opposition leaders have latched onto the rushed exercise to raise deep concerns about the integrity of voting in India, something which has long been widely accepted even as democratic freedoms have been shrinking.
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The post A Chaotic Showdown Over Election Integrity in India appeared first on New York Times.
