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What Election Commission data says about ‘vote chori’ in the Bihar elections
The Bihar Assembly elections ended with a huge mandate for the Nitish Kumar-led National Democratic Alliance. But Opposition parties have alleged that “vote chori” is the reason for their sweeping defeat.
Much of the suspicion has centred on the Election Commission's special intensive revision exercise, or SIR, which shrunk the state's voter lists by 47 lakh voters in the run-up to the polls – 68.6 lakh names were removed from the rolls and 21.53 lakh new electors added.
Did the deletions have an impact on the election results? In the weeks following the results, the Election Commission released granular data on the Bihar polls. We analysed the data to see if any red flags or anomalies showed up – nothing significant stood out.
In August, in the middle of the SIR, Scroll travelled to five villages across five constituencies in Bihar's Seemanchal region. In each of these villages, the revision had excluded more than 20% of electors from the draft voter list.
Of these villages, Ansari Tola in Banmankhi assembly constituency and Belka in Amour constituency were Muslim-majority villages, where we had interviewed several residents who had been excluded wrongfully.
In contrast, local residents of Kasba constituency's Pranpatti village told Scroll that the SIR had cleaned up the rolls by deleting voters that did not exist.
If the SIR excluded genuine electors on a large scale, these villages would likely record a drop in the number of votes cast during the 2025 Assembly elections when compared to the 2024 Lok Sabha polls and the 2020 Assembly polls.
But official booth-level data shows that more votes were cast in all five villages after the SIR.
In all five villages, the results did not change when compared to the 2020 Assembly elections. The winners are broadly the same. Only in Chandeli Karmanchak village, the Lok Janshakti Party had a lead in the 2020 polls. The following year, the Lok Janshakti Party split into two factions and one of them, Lok Janshakti Party (Ram Vilas), is now part of the National Democratic Alliance.
In 2023, a paper by economist Sabyasachi Das showed that the Bharatiya Janata Party won nearly 70% of close contests in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. This was a red flag, Das argued, because in a fair close race, each side should win about 50% of the time.
How have the BJP and the National Democratic Alliance performed in close contests in the Bihar polls? If we define close contest as a seat where the winning margin is less than 2% of the votes cast, there were 28 close contests in the 2025 Bihar Assembly elections.
The National Democratic Alliance won exactly 50% of the close contests. The Opposition Mahagathbandhan alliance won 46.4% of them and one seat went to the Bahujan Samaj Party, which is not a part of either alliance.
A party-wise breakup shows that the Janata Dal (United) and the Rashtriya Janata Dal won most of these close contests. The Congress and the Lok Janshakti Party (Ram Vilas) came second, with 10.7% of wins each, and the BJP came third, winning 7.1% of close contests.
On September 30, the Election Cmmission published the final SIR roll. That day, the poll body said that the roll had approximately “7.42 crore” electors. It gave the exact figure on October 6.
After polling closed on November 11, the EC said that the final election roll had 7.45 crore voters.
The Congress party alleged that this addition of nearly 3 lakh electors was evidence of “vote chori” by the Election Commission and the BJP. Other allies questioned it too.
But such additions are not unusual. In any election, electors are added to voter lists till the last day of filing of nominations, which is typically a few weeks before the elections. This was mentioned in the Election Commission's Bihar SIR order on June 24. For Bihar, the last day of filing nominations was October 17 for the first phase of polls and October 20 for the second phase.
Scroll analysed the final election roll and found there was 3.34 lakh net addition of electors in Bihar after the final SIR roll was published. Here's a map of where these additions were concentrated.
In the 10 seats with the highest addition of electors after SIR, the National Democratic Alliance won seven seats. Two were won by the Mahagathbandhan and one by the All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen, which is not a part of either alliance.
In eight of these constituencies, the winning margin is bigger than the added electors. But in Bodh Gaya and Belaganj, the margin is smaller than additions made after SIR. The Mahagathbandhan won Bodh Gaya and the National Democratic Alliance won Bejaganj.
In all, there were 10 seats in Bihar where electors added after SIR exceeded the margin of the winner. Five of these seats were won by the National Democratic Alliance, four by the Mahagathbandhan and one by Bahujan Samaj Party.
Source: Scroll
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