Takeaways from draft Bihar poll roll after ECI's revision

The Election Commission of India (ECI) released the draft electoral roll for Bihar after its Special Intensive Revision (SIR) on Friday.

- Abhishek Jha, Nishant Ranjan and Roshan Kishore

The draft electoral roll, according to HT’s calculations on data sourced from ECI, has 72.4 million electors. This number is the same as what was released by ECI on July 27 (no detailed breakup was given then) and 4.9 million or 6.3% less than the number of electors in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, the latest period for which we have elector count for the state.

To be sure, an ECI press release issued on Friday says that there can still be additions and deletions to this draft roll and the final count before the assembly elections could vary. Moreover, ECI’s own status report on the exercise published on August I made these comparisons with respect to the draft roll published on June 24, when there were 78.9 million electors in the state. However, since this number was not disaggregated beyond district level, HT has used the 2024 Lok Sabha numbers for the analysis of the numbers released on Friday to do an assembly constituency (AC) level analysis. Here is what the numbers suggest.

There is a wide variation in AC-wise change in number of electors

Bihar has 243 ACs across 38 districts. The AC with the highest deletion between the 2024 elector count and the SIR draft roll is Gopalganj which has seen 62,269 or 18% of its electors deleted. The AC with the lowest deletion is Dhaka in Purvi Champaran district, which has seen just 2,083 or 0.63% of its electors deleted. At the district-level, Gopalganj has seen the highest deletion while Sheikhpura has seen the lowest deletion in percentage terms. In absolute terms, it is Patna and Sheikhpura which have seen the highest and lowest number of deletions. Absolute changes in the number of electors is misleading because it can be higher for a district with more electors. Patna district has the highest number of electors in the state. To be sure, a lot of districts show a large variation in change in voter count across ACs. (See map)