Kolkata: Firoza Bibi Mandal works as a domestic help in Rajarhat, on the edge of Kolkata. She cannot read or write. She has stood in line at every election since the late 1980s. Her father has voted since 1970.On March 23, her name was struck off the electoral roll. There was no notice, no reason and no hearing. Her documents point to the likely cause of a spelling mismatch. Her voter ID card has the name “Firoja”. Her Aadhaar card, PAN card and bank passbooks say “Firoza”. This one letter, a common byproduct of Bengali-to-English transliteration, appears to have cost her 35 years of voting.At 9:55 am on April 6, an appeal was filed on her behalf, through a portal she cannot use, on a form she cannot read. More than six months later, it has still not been decided. When her family went to vote in this year’s assembly election, Firoza stayed at home. She is now afraid to apply for the state’s Annapurna scheme, and her heart races when Census enumerators knock, because one arm of the state has already told her that her papers are not in order.Earlier month, the Chief Electoral Officer of West Bengal’s election machinery announced what looked like a second chance. Special camps are being held across the state so that no eligible voter is left off the roll. The CEO’s note of October 12 calls it a “proactive campaign”. Anyone left out after the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) can walk in and apply, it says. Anyone, that is, except Firoza and about 22 lakh others like her, who were made ineligible to vote in the judicial review and then appealed to the tribunal for inclusion.According to Arindam Neyogi, Additional CEO, West Bengal, these voters are ineligible for the camps because their cases are already pending before the state’s 19 appellate tribunals, which the Commission treats as equivalent to courts. The voters have asked the Supreme Court to let them take part in the West Bengal municipal elections which are expected early next month.Firoza’s case is not unusual. All 22 lakh were declared not eligible during the SIR’s adjudication of “logical discrepancies”, a category with no definition in election law, and one that, as her J and Z mismatch show, can catch a spelling mismatch as easily as genuine ineligibility. They were told the remedy was an appeal. They appealed. Because those appeals are still pending, they could not vote in April, or in the Nandigram and Rejinagar by-elections that followed. Now they are set to miss the municipal polls too.However, a voter who was removed but never appealed, out of resignation, illiteracy or simply not knowing how, can now walk into a camp and fill in Form 6. The CEO’s press note of October 6 invites people on the list of absent, shifted and dead voters to do exactly that. The one thing that disqualifies you from the second chance is having tried to use the first.The Commission has an excuse which is not absurd on its face. If a voter’s case is before a tribunal, letting a local election officer decide the same question through Form 6 risks two bodies reaching opposite conclusions about the same person. It could also let people who were found ineligible after a judicial process simply go around it. In a system where appeals are heard within weeks, asking appellants to wait for their verdict would be sensible housekeeping.But this is not a system where appeals are heard within weeks.In its submission to the Supreme Court, in the case brought by Derek O’Brien, the Commission said 1,22,592 had been decided, about 3%. Of those, 1,13,943 ended with the person on the roll and 8,649 with the person off it. The Commission has not said how many of those inclusions were voters restored on their own appeal, and how many were its own objections being thrown out. Constituency-level data compiled by the Civic Research Group shows how uneven progress has been. In Malda, 6.85 lakh appeals have been filed and 1,027 decided. Murshidabad has decided 0.43% of its appeals, North 24 Parganas 0.39%. When the tribunals began work, all 19 sat in Kolkata, hundreds of kilometres from the border districts where many appellants live. At the pace these figures suggest, clearing the pile would take not months but years.A tribunal that may not reach your file for years is now also a hurdle on a person’s path of using the only quick remedy on offer. The appeal that was meant to protect the right to vote has become the means of suspending it, election after election.The penalty falls hardest on those who trusted the process the mostEven getting a hearing may not be enough. The Telegraph reported on October 15 the case of a 37-year-old man from Murshidabad who has worked as a civic volunteer since 2013. He cleared the written exam, the physical test and the interview for a police constable’s job, and in late September found his name on the merit list. Then the superintendent of police’s office told him his appointment could not be processed, because his name had been struck off the electoral rolls.Like Firoza, he appears to have been undone by a spelling. His father’s name in the 2002 roll did not quite match his other documents. His father died in 2011, and he submitted the death certificate. His five adult siblings, children of the same father, kept their votes. He lost his.He never received a hearing notice. So he travelled about 240 kilometres to the tribunal complex at Joka, on the southern edge of Kolkata, and pleaded with the guards at the gate. The judge heard him out of turn and decided to restore his name. The order was prepared. It has not taken effect, because it cannot be uploaded.The reason is a standoff between the tribunals and the Commission. Since September 21, the Commission’s portal has required judges to log in with their Aadhaar credentials. The judges have refused, calling it interference with a quasi-judicial authority, and have also objected to a limit of 13 documents per case. According to The Telegraph, no tribunal has been able to upload an order since then. Earlier that week, the chief minister handed out about 11,000 police recruitment letters in Kolkata. “I would have been there, collecting my letter from the chief minister,” the man told the Telegraph, “had my name remained on the voting list.”This is where the darkness turns even more evil. The penalty falls hardest on those who trusted the process most, the people who gathered documents, found the forms and filed on time. And it falls hardest where the tribunals are slowest, in the districts with the largest piles and the lowest rates of disposal.There are simple ways out. The commission could let appellants file Form 6 at the camps provisionally, with their inclusion subject to the tribunal’s final decision. It could let voters withdraw a pending appeal and apply afresh. It could send tribunal benches to sit in the districts, or fast-track the appeals of voters in areas facing municipal polls. Any one of these would respect the tribunals while ending the absurdity of punishing people for appealing.The SIR was presented as a cleaning of the rolls, a way to remove the dead, the duplicated and the ineligible. That is a legitimate aim. But a clean roll is not the one with the most names struck off. It is the one on which every eligible citizen appears. A rule that tells 22 lakh people their appeal is the very reason they cannot apply has lost sight of that difference. The Supreme Court now has the chance to restore it. Until then, Firoza will go on waiting, as she has since April, for someone to decide whether one letter makes her a voter.It is now an instrument that lets an Election Commission, whose chief is chosen by a panel the government controls, strike citizens off the roll over a misspelt letter and stall their appeals with a log-in rule. It then tells them that challenging their removal is the very reason they cannot get their vote back.A system that can do this to 22 lakh people and face no consequence is a threat to the democracy it claims to protect. A clean roll is not the one with the most names struck off. It is the one on which every eligible citizen appears. The Supreme Court now has the chance to restore that difference. Until then, Firoza will go on waiting, as she has since April, for someone to decide whether one letter makes her a voter.For our full coverage on the SIR and the issues it has brought to citizens, click here.