BENGALURU — Bengaluru's final electoral rolls are riddled with errors, containing names appearing as symbols, jumbled characters, email addresses and relationship terms in place of relative names, The Hindu reported on Friday.
The discrepancies affect at least 1,000 entries across the city, with specific polling parts showing consecutive entries carrying garbled text that makes voter identification impossible. In Dasarahalli Assembly constituency part no. 324, which has 425 electors, unusually large numbers of consecutive entries at serial numbers 4 to 7, 143 to 150, 152 to 157, 300 to 302, 306 to 313, 327 to 330, and 336 to 340 carry garbled names. At serial number 327, the elector's name appeared as "µ¢µÌèÌ" and the relative's name as "Ï¢µÈèÈ".
The problems extend to relationship columns, where entries include "Husband Husband" for elector Kavitha in Dasarahalli polling part No. 7, "Wife" entered as the relative's name for Abdul Salam in Chamarajpet, and single letters such as "S" or "B" in Mahadevapura. Other entries contain details apparently unrelated to the fields recorded, including email addresses such as "rakshithagowda1430@gmail.comgowda" in Yelahanka Assembly constituency part No. 332 and "Syed Apsar KZW1566785" in BBMP South district. A 50-year-old man's name was listed as "Channapa Gowda Patil 01/06/1974" while a 44-year-old female appeared as "??????K".
The Hindu contacted Additional Electoral Registration Officers and BLO supervisors, who said they were unaware of the cases and would look into them. A polling official attributed the problem to an error during transliteration, stating that some fonts used special codes to display Kannada letters and that if the computer could not recognise the font used when the file was converted, the letters could appear as unrelated symbols. BLOs also attributed the errors to software glitches, saying they had informed supervisors and were told to fill Form 8 seeking correction, with the assertion that the system would fix glitches after the final upload — though the errors persisted in the final rolls.
The report found that in most cases, electors said they had provided correct details and only discovered the errors later when identifying their entries by house numbers. The findings raise concerns about the verification processes applied before the final electoral rolls were published and the technical integrity of the data conversion process.
