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Hyderabad: The month-long house-to-house enumeration of voters under the third phase of the contentious special intensive revision (SIR) of voter rolls in the country began in Telangana on Thursday (June 25), with 89.88 lakh electors already flagged for ‘anomalies’ in their data.

Electors are to fill in their particulars in the enumeration forms the Election Commission (EC) will distribute and collect until July 24, including details of theirs or their relatives’ names as listed in the 2002 voter rolls. Though this process marks the start of the SIR’s public-facing phase, election officials had conducted a preliminary exercise over the past few months where they matched existing voters with the 2002 rolls.

At 99.64 lakh, Telangana has a substantial number of electors who are unmapped to the 2002 rolls, making up 29% of the state’s 3.38 crore-strong electorate. Of the state’s 2.39 crore mapped electors, 89.88 lakh or 37.67% were flagged for anomalies.

Telangana is among the 16 states and three Union territories where the EC is carrying out the third phase of its nationwide SIR, where unlike in other kinds of voter roll revision, it prepares a fresh list from scratch. Here the EC is scheduled to publish the draft voter rolls on July 31 and the final ones on October 1. The interim period is meant for the filing and disposal of claims for, and objections against, inclusions into the rolls.

EC identifies lakhs of electors with ‘anomalies’, especially in and around Hyderabad

Election officials in Telangana identified as many as 11 types of ‘anomalies’ in voter data they encountered during their pre-SIR mapping in the state. Salient among these are cases including:

Electors sharing the same parent but being less than nine months apart

Electors listed as having an age difference of less than 15 years with a parent as identified in the 2002 rolls

Electors listed as having an age difference of more than 50 years with a parent as identified in the 2002 rolls

Electors listed as having an age difference of less than 40 years with a grandparent as identified in the 2002 rolls

Electors having a parent’s name spelled differently in the current and the 2002 rolls

Electors mapped with a different relative in the current and the 2002 rolls

Electors mapped with their father in the current rolls and with their husband in the 2002 rolls

Electors’ whose........

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