A 2015 video in which former Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal claimed that the city’s electoral rolls contained around eight lakh duplicate or allegedly fake votes has gone viral after being shared by BJP national general secretary Harish Dwivedi, adding a fresh political layer to the ongoing dispute over the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of voter lists.
Dwivedi shared the old video on X on Thursday while attacking Kejriwal’s current opposition to the SIR exercise. In his post, the BJP leader said Kejriwal had once submitted evidence of “8 lakh duplicate voters” to the Election Commission and accused him of changing his position after the current revision process began removing names from the rolls.
The video shows Kejriwal explaining data that he said had been matched by his team and submitted to the Election Commission on a compact disc. According to the figures quoted by him at the time, 3,96,914 voters were associated with 11,50,509 voter cards. He said this indicated that some individuals had two, three or four voter cards.
Kejriwal said his team had compared four fields: the voter’s name, the father’s or husband’s name, age, and relationship details. He said these were the fields used by the Election Commission to identify duplicate records. He further claimed that his team had manually compared photographs on a sample basis and found instances where the same person appeared to have multiple voter registrations.
Based on that exercise, Kejriwal said around eight lakh votes were allegedly duplicate or fake and questioned how free and fair elections could be held if such records remained on Delhi’s electoral rolls. The figures and conclusions in the old video are claims made by Kejriwal at the time and are not independently established in the supplied report.
The video has resurfaced as opposition parties, including the Aam Aadmi Party, challenge the present SIR process in Delhi. The controversy intensified after more than 47.56 lakh names were excluded from the draft electoral roll prepared during the exercise, according to the report. More than 33 lakh people were also issued notices over discrepancies in their records.
Kejriwal has been publicly criticising Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar over the process and has demanded his resignation. Opposition parties have alleged irregularities in the revision and called for the exercise to be cancelled. They have also demanded that the names of all eligible voters removed from the draft list be restored and that notices issued over record discrepancies be withdrawn.
Several parties belonging to the INDIA bloc met Delhi Chief Electoral Officer Ashok Kumar on Wednesday to raise these demands. The immediate dispute therefore involves two separate questions: the historical allegations about duplicate entries cited in Kejriwal’s old video, and the current process through which names are being removed or flagged during the SIR exercise. The Election Commission’s response to the opposition’s demands will determine the next formal step in the dispute.
