Kolkata: In Hemtabad, a constituency in West Bengal’s Uttar Dinajpur district reserved for Scheduled Castes, the Election Commission (EC) has filed appeals against 15,381 voters whom judicial officers examined and found eligible during the special intensive revision (SIR). That is 44.8% of all the voters the judges cleared there.Almost all of these appeals, 12,758 of the 13,776 that carry an ID, were lodged in a single batch on the evening of April 5, 2026, two days before the roll was frozen for the assembly election.For 599 of those voters, the appeal came before their clearance had even been made public. All 599 were found eligible in Hemtabad’s 12th and last supplementary list, which was published on April 6. Yet every appeal against them carries the code for the batch lodged the evening before.The findings come from appeal records collected and verified by the Civic Research Group and provided to The Wire. The raw data was then analysed and re-verified by The Wire.Of the voters appealed against, 97.7% have Muslim names. So do all 599 voters against whom appeals were lodged before the list clearing them was published.In other words, the appeals against these 599 voters were on record before the judges’ decisions in their favour had been made public. The voters themselves had no way of knowing they had been cleared, let alone that their inclusion had already been challenged.This one decision is said to have first rung alarm bells within the Election Commission, reports @chhuti_isFull report: https://t.co/tHvFsWLQVx1/3 https://t.co/kHxRFwbuxe— The Wire (@thewire_in) October 30, 2026Appealed against before they were clearedSupplement 12 cleared 4,868 Hemtabad voters. The Commission has appealed against 2,086 of them. Of those appeals, 599 carry the April 5 code, 695 carry the code for the batch lodged on April 6 – the day the list came out – and 11 were filed online. Another 781 have been marked already disposed of.The 599 come from nine polling stations, parts 30, 31, 209, 236, 237, 239, 242, 243 and 245. Part 237 alone accounts for 162. In those nine stations, almost every appeal against a Supplement 12 voter belongs to the April 5 batch.The records cannot show whether the judicial officers’ decisions were already recorded on the Commission’s portal before the list was published. If they were, the appeals were filed against decisions the Commission could see but the voters could not. If they were not, the appeals were filed before the decisions existed in any form the appellants could have examined. Either way, the appeals came before the decisions were made public.The Supreme Court’s order of April 6, which the Commission now cites as authority for appeals against inclusion, was issued the same day the list was published, and the day after the April 5 batch. In that order the apex court had noted that ‘objectors’ or ‘authorities’ of the EC may move the appellate tribunals set up in Bengal against the inclusion of names in the voter list.How Hemtabad’s voters were sifted throughOf the constituency’s 2,65,162 voters on the draft roll, 52,542, nearly one in five, were placed under adjudication. Judicial officers struck 18,215 of them off the roll and found 34,327 eligible.The Commission has since appealed against 15,381 of them, equal to 5.8% of the constituency’s entire draft roll. The appeals reach into 249 of the constituency’s 257 polling stations. In part 77, the Commission has appealed against 307 of the 408 voters judges cleared, or 75%.One batchEvery pending appeal carries an ID. Civil rights activists working on the SIR have decoded the IDs’ structure, and The Wire has independently verified their reading. One letter in each ID marks the batch in which it was lodged.Of Hemtabad’s 13,776 pending appeals, 12,758, or 92.6%, carry the C code, for the batch lodged on April 5, two days before the roll was frozen for the assembly election. Another 978 carry the D code, for April 6. Only 40 were filed online, on dates of their own.The remaining 1,605 appeals are marked disposed, and carry no ID. Most of them, 1,369, concern voters cleared in the constituency’s last two supplementary lists.In Hemtabad, the C-series numbers were not issued in tidy blocks for each polling station, as they were in Samserganj (Murshidabad district) and Sujapur (Malda district). They run from 18 to 13,560, with 785 numbers missing, and move back and forth between polling stations.Who is being appealed againstOf the 15,381 voters appealed against, at least 15,030, or 97.7%, have Muslim names, counting the voter’s own name or a relative’s. That largely mirrors who was cleared. At least 97% of all 34,327 voters the judges found eligible in Hemtabad have Muslim names, though minorities make up about 43% of the constituency’s population. As in Samserganj and Sujapur, the skew lies in who was placed under adjudication in the first place.The Commission’s appeal rate in Hemtabad, 44.8%, is close to its statewide rate of 49.4%.What is at stakeIn April, the BJP’s Haripada Barman won Hemtabad from the Trinamool Congress (TMC), beating its candidate Satyajit Barman by 12,361 votes. The TMC held the seat in 2021 by 27,215 votes.The Commission’s appeals cover 15,381 voters, more than the winning margin. The appeals cannot change the April result, but if they succeed, they will shape every contest that follows.The tribunals in Kolkata have so far marked 1,605 of Hemtabad’s appeals as disposed of. The rest are pending before the tribunals, which have not been able to upload an order since September 21, after judges refused an EC portal requirement to log in with their Aadhaar credentials.The EC told the Supreme Court on October 26 that these appeals were filed by “officers of the Office of the CEO, West Bengal”. It has not said which officers, or on what grounds they challenged voters whom judicial officers had found eligible.For our full coverage on the SIR and the issues it has brought to citizens, click here.