New Delhi: Muslims, who form 13.6% of electors on Delhi’s draft roll, made up 20.3% of all voters flagged for “logical discrepancies” in the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) process, and 30% of them were flagged under reasons indicative of family size, an analysis by The Hindu has found.It was found that the Election Commission of India’s (ECI’s) centralised ERONET software, and not electoral registration officers (EROs) – the statutory custodians of the rolls – was deciding who got flagged for “logical discrepancies” in Delhi’s draft rolls, and their records was marking a disproportionately higher number of Muslims.The draft SIR rolls in Delhi had 97.54 lakh voters, of whom 33.12 lakh were flagged for notices by the ECI, the report said. The latter set included 13.79 lakh were flagged as “Unmapped with Last SIR” and 19.33 lakh for “logical discrepancies” based on eight reasons.Roughly 13.3 lakh voters, or 13.6%, in the draft rolls were Muslims. Per the daily, among those flagged as “unmapped”, 7.6% were Muslims, meaning more voters from the community could map themselves with the last SIR. However, under “logical discrepancies”, Muslims accounted for 20.3% of the voters.“To put it another way, for every 1,000 Muslim electors in the draft roll, 318 were flagged for “logical discrepancies”, while the corresponding figure for the rest of the non-Muslim electors was 197 per 1,000,” the report says.There are eight reasons for “logical discrepancies” according to ECI’s guidelines – name mismatches, five reasons based on family size or children, parents marked “ineligible in the last SIR”, and the last “no reasons mentioned”. In the last category in Delhi SIR, nearly 60,000 electors were flagged and the share of Muslims was disproportionately higher at nearly 20%.It is in the second broad category, which includes “progeny >= 6”, “parent age difference >50”, “grandparent age difference <40”, “progeny age gap <9 months”, and “parent age difference <15”, the proportion of Muslims among those flagged is much higher, the report notes, highlighting that these are reasons indicative of family size.The report adds that of the 6.75 lakh electors flagged for one or more of these reasons, 30% were Muslims – more than double their 13.6% share in the draft electoral rolls – and of the 1.4 lakh electors flagged with “Progeny >=6”, Muslims accounted for 58% flaggings – four times higher than their share among electors.The figures, per The Hindu report, indicated that the criteria may overlap with demographic differences between religious communities, linked to fertility rate.However, the National Family Health Survey’s recent reports show that India’s fertility rates have declined across religious groups.These findings, thus, raise questions about how the election commission designed the criteria and whether the checks could disproportionately affect Muslim voters.To date, the ECI has not explained the reasons for which an elector on the draft SIR rolls could be flagged for “logical discrepancies”.For our full coverage on the SIR and the issues it has brought to citizens, click here.