‘Voters registered at multiple booths’: UP minister questions SIR in constituency

“We physically verified each voter’s name before preparing the report and submitting it for inquiry. In the process, we found 9,200 names that are registered at multiple places,” Jaiswal said.

He said party workers involved in the process discovered that some voters’ names were listed at as many as five places. “I call it ‘vote jihad,” Jaiswal told The Indian Express over phone.

In a video doing the rounds on social media, the minister is purportedly heard saying, “I believe that every person in India should have their name on the voter list at only one place. If a name appears at two places, then what is the meaning of the SIR? The purpose of SIR was to conduct a thorough and in-depth verification. Yet, even now, we have found more than 9,200 such names in my assembly constituency alone. Reports from other areas are still awaited.”

He further said, “When BLOs and party workers went door to door for verification, they found that in many cases the same person’s name — whether with the father’s or the husband’s—was registered not just once, but in some places twice and in others even five times.”

He said they conducted verification of 90,000 voters. “We have so far identified 9,200 names that appear five, four, three times, twice in duplicate,” he says in the video.