Alive and around – but no longer on the Bihar voter list

On August 1, 2025, Rahima Khatun, 74, lost her right to vote. The Election Commission of India struck her off the voter list because it believed that she had shifted away permanently from her village, Ansari Tola, in Bihar’s Purnia district.

But after we made a few inquiries in the village, she emerged from her small brick house and sat down in a chair in the courtyard. She had been here all this time.

Her son Mohammad Aslam explained that the local booth level officer, or BLO, had delivered Rahima’s enumeration form to another village in July. “By the time the form came back, the deadline had passed,” he said. “Then two men from the local administration came and told me that her name had been deleted.”

The Election Commission is drawing up a new voter list for Bihar from scratch. This list would be the basis of the assembly elections in the state later this year.

The exercise, called a special intensive revision, began on June 25, with booth-level officers tasked with collecting enumeration forms from 7.89 crore voters in the state within 31 days.

On August 1, the poll body produced a draft list, which included the names of everyone in Bihar who had submitted the...

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