Goa is inching closer towards the release of its final voter list. Some reports have suggested that around 100,000 (one lakh) names are likely to be deleted from the electoral rolls. If true, this is huge. It could change the face of Goa's electorate, not to mention about the results that can be expected.
Recently, a cartoon showed the world's elite hoping that they somehow didn't figure in the Jeffry Epstein Files. On the other hand, the poor in India have been only hoping that they somehow figure in the electoral roles. But this is a serious matter. The story is in the numbers....
Roughly speaking, Goa's electorate stands at about 11.8“11.9 lakh voters: for instance, the electoral roll around April 2024 listed roughly 11,79,344 electors, after continuous updating and additions of new voters, reports tell us.
This small number saw many win by even smaller numbers. In the 2022 Goa Assembly elections, 11 of the 17 re-elected MLAs won by margins of under 10%. About the others, figures are not readily available, but that too can be calculated. In the 2022 Assembly elections, at least 11 constituencies were won with under 10% margins.
In a small-electorate state like Goa ” with roughly 11.8“12 lakh registered voters ” removing 100,000 names would amount to deleting 8“9% of the entire roll. This could have quite tangible electoral and political effects: at the constituency level (in quite a few of Goa's 40 seats).
Why? Removing an average of about 2,500 voters per seat is large enough to exceed typical victory margins in many Goan electoral contests. This could potentially alter outcomes in closely-fought areas. Beyond immediate seat arithmetic, such a reduction could reshape turnout percentages. It could also distort demographic representation if deletions disproportionately affect migrants, youth or specific communities.
It could likewise also trigger legitimacy or trust concerns if the process appears opaque. Or unaccountable. Administratively, it might improve electoral roll accuracy if genuinely removing duplicates or shifted voters ” in the Special Intensive Revision, being overseen by the Election Commission of India.
But, politically, it could shift campaign strategies, resource allocation, and party calculations about “safe” versus “swing” seats. In short, because Goa’s constituencies are compact, tiny and winning margins frequently narrow, a change of that magnitude is not just about statistical housekeeping.
It actually could materially influence representation.
We are being told that the extra 8-9 per cent who were present in the rolls didn't deserve to be there. Is this a political decision, or an administrative one? If it is an unbiased administrative decision, how do we justify that these voters have been on the rolls for so long, without anyone challenging their presence there?
Further, how do we account for the fact that Goa has mostly had "high" voter turnouts, despite these allegedly undeserving voters' names being on the list. Among those deleted names are absent or shifted voters. So, who was voting in their place all this time, if we are to believe the official position now?
Elvis Gomes, former bureaucrat turned Opposition politician, has asked some blunt questions about the SIR. This resulted in a recent Prudent video titled 'SIR targeting Goan minorities?' While the charge has a question mark at its end, the concerns voiced do deserve answers. Gomes accepts that the awareness of the people is quite low, and they've not been awakened yet. He also pointed out that there were some who had not received their forms till very late in the day, as in the case of 200 voters in parts of Panaji.
The question remains: was this mismanagement, or deliberate exclusions? Does it amount to keeping out of targeted people, those who are unlikely to vote for certain parties?
Gomes has argued that if you look at West Bengal or Tamil Nadu, the trends were clear, and nothing different would be seen in Goa.
Some were facing procedural trouble. Persons were shown as being absent or having shifted. Besides the Block Level Officials (BLOs), who are government servants, the political parties had a say in the process as BLA (booth level agents). Other parties had lacked the infrastructure and manpower, when compared to the BJP, so it placed them at a disadvantage.
In the discussion, Gomes wanted to know why only political parties and their representatives needed to be empowered in the process. Why not give power to citizens too, he asked. He recalled that there was a time when officials would go and get people onto the rolls. Now, the trend seems to be exclude people. This leaves one asking whether we're seeing a purge, with potentially 'hostile voters' being kept out. Procedural lapses could affect the vulnerable voter, he argued.
More recently, officialdom brought up the issue of logical discrepancies. This included minor discrepancies in the spellings of names, and the like. For instance, as Gomes pointed out, in the past, the names of persons were sometimes recorded first in the Nagari script, and then rendered back into the Roman script. This itself could have caused the issue in some cases. The system is generating mass scale notices, as he noted.
All this comes on top of the many reasons why elections in our part of the world have been criticised and questioned.
These range from: opacity in political funding (electoral bonds), to concerns over voting technology (EVMs, VVPATs), shameless defections and post-poll realignments, use of "dummy" or proxy candidates to split Opposition votes, money power, identity-based polarisations, media imbalance, misuse of state machinery (including timings of welfare announcements), weak to non-existing inner-party democracy, criminalisation and politics, disinformation, among others.
Elections, like Caesar’s wife, must be above suspicion ” not only fair and transparent, but unmistakably seen to be so; without that, public trust in political representation collapses.
