Election Commission sought explanation from officials as goof-up in voter list went viral

Chief Electoral Officer (CEO) Navdeep Rinwa shows his inked finger after casting his vote in the Legislative Council elections at Kendriya Vidyalaya in Lucknow on October 23, 2026.

After unusual names and details cropped up in the electoral roll for Legislative Council polls in Uttar Pradesh, the Election Commission sought an explanation from the concerned Electoral Registration Officer, who is the Divisional Commissioner and Additional Electoral Registration Officer. The error led to uproar on social media.

Entries such as “Ram ne Yadav ko maara”, “Ram ne Sharma ko maara” as names and “B.Com” in place of a voter’s father’s name have surfaced in the electoral roll for the Legislative Council polls held on Friday (October 23, 2026). The discrepancies were found in the Allahabad graduate constituency voter list ahead of polling.

“For the first time, an online registration facility has been provided in Uttar Pradesh for adding names to the voter list for the Legislative Council elections. There is a possibility of mistakes when doing any work for the first time. Out of 14,81,310 entries in the voter list, there are a total of 158 entries in which the names of the voters or their relatives appear strange. The strangeness of these names is due to such a mistake. The software was supposed to transliterate the names typed in English into Hindi, but probably due to some error, it translated them. For example, when Ram hit Yadav was typed, the software translated it as ‘Ram hit Yadav’. There was a system to edit and correct such mistakes, but where people were not careful, such mistakes persisted. Typing B Com in place of father is a human error or negligence,” reads a statement issued by the Chief Electoral Officer, Uttar Pradesh.

The statement further reads, “The Divisional Commissioner is the Electoral Registration Officer (ERO) in this voter list, and the District Officer of the concerned district is the Assistant Electoral Registration Officer (AERO). It is their responsibility to keep the voter list free from all errors. An explanation has been sought from them in this regard. Instructions have been given to the district officers to ensure that voters do not face any problem due to this mistake,”.

The five graduates’ constituencies namely Lucknow, Agra, Meerut, Varanasi and Allahabad-Jhansi, while the six teachers’ constituencies include Lucknow, Agra, Meerut, Varanasi, Bareilly-Moradabad and Gorakhpur-Faizabad covering over 30 districts in U.P. went for polls with over 14 lakh voters.