New Delhi: A woman living in Nalasopara on the outskirts of Mumbai appears to be listed six times in the voter roll, with each entry having a different elector photo ID card (EPIC) number.News of Sushama Gupta seemingly appearing multiple times in the voter roll comes against the backdrop of Lok Sabha leader of opposition Rahul Gandhi pointing to multiple discrepancies in the voter rolls of the Mahadevapura assembly constituency in Bengaluru – where the BJP maintained a lead during the general election last year – which he alleged was a result of collusion between the EC and the saffron party.It also comes amid reports of discrepancies in the draft voter roll shared by the EC as part of its contentious special intensive revision ongoing in Bihar.‘Gupta Gupta’Sushama Gupta, a 39-year-old resident of the Nalasopara assembly constituency in Maharashtra’s Palghar district, seems to figure six times in the electoral roll, with each entry carrying a different EPIC number, Alt News journalist Abhishek Kumar pointed out on X on Tuesday (August 12).All entries – one of which lists her name as ‘Gupta Gupta’ – have similar photographs attached with them, list her husband’s name as Sanjay Gupta, her age as 39 years old and her place of residence as the Mata Jivdani Chawl, per the roll shared by Kumar.When one attempts to search for a 39-year-old Sushama Gupta married to one Sanjay Gupta in the Nalasopara constituency on the ‘electoral search’ section of the Election Commission (EC)’s website, the latter returns five results, with four of them falling in the seat’s Nilemore part and one in its Tulinj part.Searching for a 39-year-old woman named ‘Gupta Gupta’ married to Sanjay Gupta in the same seat yields a separate entry in the Nilemore part.A cross-verification exercise conducted by the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative (CHRI) showed that Sushama Gupta’s name also appears six times in the voter roll uploaded onto the EC’s website, with one entry again listing her name as ‘Gupta Gupta’.All six entries – containing different EPIC numbers – say she lives in the Mata Jivdani Chawl and that her husband’s name is Sanjay Gupta.One entry – pertaining to the Tulinj locality – is marked ‘deleted’, an extract of the roll downloaded from the EC’s website and shared by CHRI director Venkatesh Nayak on Tuesday shows.Unlike the five other entries, which list her age as 39, the ‘deleted’ entry says she is 40 years old.An attempt to look up the corresponding entry on the EC’s website using its EPIC number does not indicate its ‘deleted’ status, Nayak pointed out in a note.The roll downloaded from the EC’s website is labelled as having been updated last on November 29, 2024. “Perhaps this list was prepared after the summary revision of the electoral rolls” ahead of the assembly elections that took place on November 20, Nayak said.It does not contain photos of electors in line with the EC’s policy to protect voters’ privacy, suggesting that the roll uploaded by Kumar and others on social media may be one that had been provided to polling agents, Nayak said, although it is unclear whether it was used for the assembly election or the Lok Sabha election that took place earlier that year.The roll downloaded from the EC’s website also has different serial numbers for each entry pertaining to Sushama Gupta from the one shared on social media.What the EC website saysMeanwhile, parsing the six entries pertaining to Sushama Gupta returned using the ‘electoral search’ tool on the EC’s website shows that in five cases the same district election officer (Govind Bodke), electoral registration officer (Shekhar Ghadge) and booth-level officer (Sakshi Sawant) are listed. In one case, the former two officials are the same but the latter is named Pallavi Sawant.“It is intriguing that none of these officers discovered the multiple entries at the time of finalising the voter list for two rounds of elections, namely the Lok Sabha and the Vidhan Sabha elections,” Nayak said.He continued: “This is but one claim of discrepancy being reported by the media which we were able to cross check given the very limited human resources available at our disposal … The ERO, DEO, the chief electoral officer, Maharashtra and the [EC] have much to account for to the citizenry.”